The outcome would probably have been the same, but with a stain of hatred between the peoples. There would have been a genuine basis for Norwegian anti-colonialist repudiation of all things Danish, otherwise propounded only by the anti-Danish Henrik Wergeland and the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem Peer Gynt of 1867, in which the characterization of the history of the union as “four hundred years of darkness” was first minted. The line “Twice two hundred years of darkness brooded o’er the race of monkeys” (where the monkeys are the Norwegians) is uttered while Peer Gynt is in a madhouse in Cairo. Ibsen did not, as is popularly believed, subscribe to this interpretation of the shared history of the countries. On the contrary, this was a confrontation with his countrymen and their mentality and probably a reckoning with himself and his earlier, more national-romanticist works on subjects borrowed from the age of the sagas. Peer Gynt was a confrontation with a mentality Ibsen believed was typically Norwegian and the poem should be read as a satirical fantasy about a boastful egotist, the feckless and irresponsible Peer, a character of Norwegian folklore.1

As things were after the loss of Norway, everyone in the Nordic countries2 managed to get used to living in small independent nation states, especially after Norway and Sweden peacefully dissolved their union in 1905, Finland achieved independence in 1917, and Iceland became largely independent in 1918. It was by no means a given that things would turn out this way, but when they did, the foundation was laid for today’s good relations among the countries and especially the peoples. So, in the long view, it was probably best that things went as they did in 1814. But this was not easy to imagine at the time.

From the Danish point of view, the break was so enormous that it was psychologically repressed. A half-century later, 1814 paled in the light of the total defeat in 1864 — but the critical step on Denmark’s journey to becoming a small nation was the loss of Norway in 1814. This is probably why the year has been forgotten or at any rate ignored in Denmark. The surrender was simply too painful. This began with Frederick VI himself, who considered the defeat and the loss of Norway so ignominious that he later forbade any mention of it. And the Danes by and large followed his lead to such a degree that Norway was essentially written out of Danish history. In 1954, Georg Nørregård examined the Treaty of Kiel in January 1814 from a traditional foreign policy angle, a subject upon which he gave a lecture to a group of supremely uninterested history students in Århus — including the present author.

Apart from traditional diplomatic history, the separation between Denmark and Norway has largely been passed over in silence, even in the massive work on the history of Danish foreign policy, Dansk Udenrigspolitiks historie.3 The meager focus on the consequences of the separation was due to the structure of the work, where 1814 was the cut-off year between Volume II and Volume III. This structure, not inherently unreasonable, causes Norway to vanish from the Danish horizon as a result of the impossible position of the multinational state in the European conflict after 1807—1814, given that there is no further analysis of the long-term consequences. Nor was this shortcoming definitively corrected in Ole Feldbæk’s final volume of the Danish-Norwegian depiction of the shared history of Denmark and Norway from 1380 to 1814.4 Brilliant works of cultural history like John Erichsen’s Drømmen om Norge and an anthology entitled Norgesbilleder published in connection with an exhibition on the common history of the two countries at the Danish Museum of National History in Hillerød in North Zealand in 2004,5 call attention to important elements of the shared culture, but these, too, fail to definitively rectify the mutual ignorance of the two countries’ shared history. Only in recent years has a young Danish historian, Rasmus Glenthøj, provided a comprehensive analysis of the background and consequences of the separation from both the Norwegian and Danish perspectives in a series of exciting and thoroughly documented works. His contribution has culminated in Skilsmissen: Dansk og norsk identitet før og efter 1814.

The descent of the Danish state, or more accurately the Oldenburgian state, from a mid-sized European power to a helpless small nation happened in 1814, although the fate of the nation was not finally sealed until the total defeat of 1864. The political amateurism that continued until 1864 can be explained as a consequence of 1814. That year entailed not only the loss of one third of the nation’s population and an even larger proportion of its territory, but also a change in the demographic composition from about one third Danish, one third Norwegian, and one third Holsteiners (and Schleswigers) to a situation in which the German-speaking 40 percent ruled the Danish-speaking 60 percent, when they formerly had made up only about 25 percent of the population of the entire realm. This led almost inevitably to national conflict and a civil war in 1848—1851, which culminated in the Danish defeat by Prussia and Austria in 1864. It is difficult to determine today whether things necessarily had to go this way, but the conflict was lying in wait, especially since the Holstein elite had retreated to their estates in Holstein after the attempt to centralize the state following the incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein in the wake of the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The economic hardships of the war culminated in a national bankruptcy in 1813; the loss of agricultural exports to Norway and tax revenues from that country, so rich in natural resources, transformed the Danish Monarchy into a small, poor country, albeit still a multinational one by virtue of Schleswig-Holstein and the islands in the Atlantic. The fateful year of 1814 dealt a nearly insurmountable blow to the Danish state that, after total defeat in 1864, took a new, nationally and socially homogeneous shape. That new Denmark is embraced with great satisfaction today, just as the foundation was laid for good relations among the modern Nordic states. But this occurred at the expense of a larger and more multinational state formation, which we now remember only vaguely and which was until recently either ignored or disparaged.

Denmark — or rather the Oldenburg Monarchy — suffered critical defeats between 1645 and 1660 at the hand of its hereditary enemy, Sweden, which had been ruled by kings of the House of Vasa since 1523, after Gustav Vasa severed the country’s ties with the Danish-dominated Kalmar Union. But the state survived as a composite of four realms and a number of dependencies in the Atlantic, augmented by an overseas colonial empire that made it possible to engage in the profitable triangular trade of slaves and sugar cane, albeit at a far more modest level than Britain or France. In addition to the Kingdom of Denmark, made up of Northern Jutland, the Islands, and Norway, the state comprised the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which were gradually incorporated into the state after 1721. Ever since the dissolution of the medieval Kalmar Union, which most closely resembled the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the same period (Rzeczpospolita in Polish, from res publica), Denmark and Sweden had been embroiled in savage competition for dominion over the Baltic  — Dominium Maris Baltici — which ended in victory for Russia. But the two Nordic states remained multinational states — called composite states by historians — until 1809, when Sweden was compelled to cede the Finnish part of the realm to the Russian tsar. The Swedish-Finnish state was recently analyzed in a fascinating anthology from Åbo Akademi University, edited by Max Engman and Nils Erik Vilstrand, Maktens mosaik. After this painful loss, a nearly united Sweden sought compensation in the form of Norway, successfully after the election of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte as heir to the throne and the Danish monarch’s defeat alongside Napoleon in 1813, which resulted in the Treaty of Kiel in January 1814. At one stroke, an entirely new geopolitical situation was created in the Nordic region: one which by way of 1905, 1917, 1918, and 1920 led to the modern-day balance between virtually equal nation states that are in the main mutually sympathetic.

The existence of five national homogeneous states in the Nordic region became possible because the interests of the great powers of northern Europe had held each other in check; apart from isolated threats against Denmark and Finland, the countries were never in immediate jeopardy. Especially in the Cold War era of 1948 to 1989, peace reigned in the Nordic region by virtue of the firmly established Iron Curtain that cut through the Baltic. At the time, we did not know how safe we were, but it became clear to many after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The actually peaceful and predictable nature of international politics explains why public enthusiasm for the Nordic alternative was at its peak between 1945 and 1989. During this period, Sweden could play the neutrality card, while Denmark, Norway, and Iceland could be on the winning NATO side without having to foot the bill. Finland is the Nordic exception: the country demonstrated its will to survive in 1939—1944 and thus escaped the cruel fate of Estonia — annexation by the Soviet Union. That is why the country wholeheartedly joined the European Community in 1995 and has embraced the euro, in contrast to the more hesitant Sweden and Denmark.6

Seen in the longer historical perspective, the Nordic countries are not as different from other European countries as the ideology of Scandinavism and the Scandinavian model would lead us to believe — but they are Lutheran.7 It wasn’t the Reformation of 1536 that was fundamental, but rather the pious revivalist movements of the 1700s that took hold of the populations of all the Nordic countries, a development that continued with the political and economic movements and the 20th century’s leftwing/environmental alliances in the democracy of farmers and the working class. This process is brilliantly described in the late Niels Kayser Nielsen’s major synthesis on Nordic democracy, Bonde, stat og hjem. Nielsen describes the rationale for the Nordic welfare state as stemming less from a distinctly Nordic social structure than from the homogeneous Lutheranism of the countries. Other Lutheran communities are part of larger state formations (Germany and the United States) or have been conquered by other realms (Estonia and Latvia), but in the Nordic countries, the Lutherans dominate entire states. The link has not yet been systematically studied, but from the perspective of the history of mentalities, it seems plausible. If the hypothesis proves correct, the consequence would be that Nordic social democracy, regardless of what is said in party platforms and by generations of party members, is the result of secularized Lutheranism rather than democratized socialism. This explanation of the distinct character of the Nordic region is one of the explanations discussed in a recently published anthology in English edited by Jóhann Páll Árnason and Björn Wittrock, Nordic Paths to Modernity. The book consists of five pairs of chapters covering various explanations of the development of the Nordic countries written by Nordic historians and sociologists, which are supported by a general essay on Nordic modernity.

The relatively smooth course of democratization in the Nordic countries was paved by peace, since the countries were spared involvement in international conflicts. They were in the right place at the right time. To the extent that they no longer are, it becomes difficult to live high on the Nordic myths and braggadocio of yesteryear. There is much to indicate that the Baltic Region is on the verge of reclaiming its former place as an economic and civilizational axis in northern Europe, as I described in 1998 in a book on European identity.8 In that position, however, the region is attracting international attention, with no guarantee that the superpowers will constrain each other as they did during the Cold War. To the extent that this occurs, it will be difficult to bridge the antagonism between the Atlantic part of the Nordic sphere facing the oceans in one direction and the land-based Nordic region facing the Baltic Sea in the other. Not to mention the Arctic, where Denmark-Greenland — or the “Kingdom”, as it is called when the Commonwealth of the Realm engages in international politics — in alliance with Iceland and the United States is pursuing a different policy from that of Norway, Russia, and Canada with regard to national control over the shipping routes that are opening in pace with global warming.9 Herein lies the potential basis for future conflicts of interest that will make the historical battles between Denmark and Norway over the right to East Greenland seem like small potatoes.

The lesson history teaches us is that there is no objective law that binds the Nordic peoples to a common fate. But the historical and cultural raw materials for building such an identity do exist — if, mind you, the nations wish it. While there are no economic and geopolitical regularities at stake, the political and cultural opportunities are so much the greater. In a cooperating Europe, it is important to hold on to the strengths in the arena of civil society that Nordic cooperation does in fact have — this in order to assign value to these strengths, but also to ensure they are not lost in a misguided attempt to turn the Nordic countries into a state proper or a federation. Economic and political cooperation has always failed at the broader level, but succeeded at the narrower level, that of the civil society.

The root of both the strengths and the weaknesses of this cooperation is that the countries were organized early on as relatively small and homogeneous nation states.10 And that is a product of 1814. The history of this process is, however, considerably less familiar to the Nordic peoples than it should be. On the other hand, there is a widespread but vague sense that we have a great deal in common, although we simply do not know each other well outside of a narrow elite of politicians, civil servants, and prominent figures in the arts. Nevertheless, judging by opinion polls, Nordic cooperation is viewed favorably by the people of the Nordic countries. But this positive interest in their neighboring countries is losing ground fast, especially among the young and the youngish. This is particularly evident in the language, where Swedish and Danish are often considered, even by university students, mutually unintelligible. Norwegian might perhaps be understood but is considered, at least by Danish students, as a peculiar form of Danish, littered with spelling errors and amusing neologisms — or as utterly mysterious, should they happen to stumble upon a text written in New Norwegian. To top it off, most people do not consider Finnish, Icelandic, Faroese, Greenlandic, or Sami to be Nordic languages at all.

As a result, conferences outside particularly committed Nordic circles are increasingly being held in English. This is why, when a group of Nordic historians published a cross-Nordic presentation of important themes in the countries’ histories, we chose to do so in English.11 Differences in VAT rules have unfortunately made the book almost prohibitively expensive in Denmark, but in the rest of the Nordic countries — and especially outside them — it has gradually gained an audience due to its novel cross-national analysis of these themes. The usual procedure in inter-Nordic publications is to assemble a team of authors and have each write about their own country. The good books are coordinated and involve Finland and Iceland; the poorly edited books — sadly, most of them — omit both.

There are several reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs, including the countries’ various approaches to European cooperation. Before diving into the lamentations, so common among dyed-in-the-wool Nordists, who decry the EU as an enemy of the Nordic countries, it is important to acknowledge that this situation is a logical consequence of the arrangement of Nordic cooperation, which is grounded in the sovereignty of the national states. Successful Nordic cooperation was not a result of the romantic Scandinavism rife in Denmark and Sweden in the mid 19th century. In reality, these currents had to do with an attempt by Sweden to muster assistance against Russia, which had conquered the eastern part of Sweden in 1809 and established the Grand Duchy of Finland, while Denmark was seeking assistance against the expanding Germany, which was on the verge of unity — considerably helped along by the foolhardy policies of the Danish National Liberals in 1863—1864, without which it is by no means certain that Bismarck would have succeeded in uniting Germany in 1871.12 Norway and Iceland were primarily interested in their own independence, while Finland successfully became Finnish under relatively benevolent Russian suzerainty. These considerations were obviously irreconcilable and it all came to nothing. Cultural Scandinavism on the other hand, especially in literature, remained a vigorous force throughout the 19th century, although it rarely included Finland and Iceland.13

The Nordic region as a model of regional partnership is mainly the outcome of practical and pragmatic cooperation in a long list of professional areas that developed in the second half of the 19th century — but the necessary prerequisite was that the countries were independent. Thus the Nordic Association could not be established until 1919 after the dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway in 1905 and Iceland’s de facto independence from Denmark in 1918 (completed in 1944). Finland likewise became independent in 1917, but was at first and for many years preoccupied mainly with its own internal conflicts and relations with Russia, as one of the successor states of the Russian Empire. In reality, Finland did not embark upon the Nordic path until the end of the 1930s and not definitively until after its defeat by the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939—1940 and the Continuation War of 1940—1944, so brilliantly described by Henrik Meinander in Finlands historia.

Nordic cooperation as formalized in the Nordic Council in 1952 (expanded with the accession of Finland in 1955) is unusual in being at once far-reaching in numerous areas of the civil society yet weak on the governmental level. For a long time, Nordic cooperation was run primarily by the parliaments, not the governments. Lack of interference with national sovereignty was the prerequisite for this success. The Nordic approach to international coordination of legislation has worked extremely well, except in the critical areas of economic policy, foreign policy, and defense. The Nordic countries have failed at every attempt in these areas, from the Scandinavian Defense Union in the late 1940s to Nordek in 1970.15 This is not surprising in light of the geopolitical placement of the Nordic countries. But for precisely that reason, it is also no wonder that the peoples have drifted apart linguistically and thus, over time, psychologically as well.

Well into the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the universal Nordic welfare state flourished in opposition to the patriarchal systems of the European Continent and the Anglo-American systems of minimal government. As historical studies have shown, there was a great deal of mythology involved in the cultivation of these differences. Welfare researchers speak bluntly of a model made up of five exceptions.16 One gets the same impression from a comparative analysis of the distinctive characteristics of Nordic capitalism.17 The universal aspect of the welfare state, that citizenship alone conferred rights to uniform benefits, regardless of any connection to the labor market, has long been an important difference between the Nordic countries and the rest of Europe, hence the widespread notion of the socially minded and democratic Nordic region in contrast to Catholic and Conservative Europe. Today, this hallmark has been modified by the introduction of employment-related pensions, and it is thus likely that the distinctively Nordic, democratic nationalism will also decline in importance.

Each in its own way, Sweden and Norway also kept their distance from the European community, while Denmark acceded in 1973. And therewith began a political divide that deepened when Sweden and Finland joined the EU in 1995 and Norway once again chose to remain on the outside — albeit in such a way that the country, like Iceland, adopts EU legislation on the inner market through the EEC. These divergent choices go some way towards explaining the lack of interest in Nordic cooperation among the governments of Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, but not the more deep-seated cultural and political differences that have become increasingly clear in recent years, even though Iceland has flirted with the idea of joining the EU since the financial crisis of 2008. Though it will probably come to nothing, this, combined with the economic collapse, has given the Faeroe Islands reason to think again about whether they should continue down the road towards full independence or settle for home rule like that granted to Greenland in 2009.

Denmark and Sweden in particular have grown apart from each other politically. Sweden has officially declared itself a multicultural land of immigrants with the abolition of the close connection between the Lutheran church and the state. In Denmark, the debate on the relationship between church and state has finally begun, at least in circles with a particular interest, but most politicians who express an opinion on the subject adhere firmly to the utterly vague balance of power we call the “people’s church”. Among younger politicians, there seems to be enthusiasm for total separation, but the people’s church, more than 150 years old, seems as popular as ever with the Danish people. Indeed, along with the so-called “grammatical comma” (which is actually German and diverges from both Norwegian and Swedish), the majority of the population seem to perceive the national church as the most important guarantee of “Danishness”. Along with the religious holidays like the Public Day of Prayer and Ascension Day, it has proven more difficult to abolish than the Danish government envisaged. Norway has recently disestablished the state church in favor of an arrangement designated the “people’s church”, whereby the Evangelical Lutheran Church is accorded the status of one among many religious communities. It is too soon to tell whether this will eventually entail a separation of church and state as in Sweden or a vague situation like that in Denmark.

On the other hand, Denmark is leading the way in Europe along with Austria, Italy, and perhaps the Netherlands, towards curbing immigration. The discourse in Norway — thus far — is different from the discourse in Denmark. On the surface, the words are politically correct as in Sweden, but the actual deeds are closer to Denmark’s. Iceland and Finland have not yet been challenged to the point where it has been necessary to take an open stance on immigration. It is too early to say whether all of this combined with foreign policy differences will drive the Nordic countries even further apart. These issues were discussed at a series of meetings at the Norwegian embassy in Stockholm, the proceedings of which have been published in an anthology, Skandinaviska vägval, edited by Bjørn Magnus Berge and Anders Björnsson.

Under the surface in Sweden there lies a latent threat of violent revolt against the multicultural policy and political correctness, which Danish media love to talk about. But there is a strong tradition in Sweden of putting a lid on that kind of behavior, while in Denmark there has been, since the breakthrough of “popular” movements in the 19th century, a strong tradition of anti-elite populism that has been simply called “folkelighed”, which is perceived as benign and good. The present course has also been followed for some time, as evident in the Danish Power and Democracy Study, for instance, which was more reassuring about democracy than the almost contemporaneous Norwegian power study under the direction of Øyvind Østerud.18 By 1973, Denmark had already taken a different route from that of the other Nordic countries with the breakthrough of Glistrup’s Progress Party. The differences did not become actual system differences, however, until the alliance established between the Danish People’s Party, the Liberal Party, and the Conservative People’s Party of 2001—2011. The center-right government in power in Sweden since 2006 has not brought about any significant rapprochement. On the contrary, a united political Sweden has successfully isolated the Sweden Democrats, even though the party gained seats in the Riksdag on the strength of a platform and strategy lifted from the Danish People’s Party. The situation is however still relatively open, as is also the case in Norway, where the present government is likely to be exchanged for a coalition of the conservatives and the Progress Party.

In that situation, the future seems dim for the Swedish historian and former government official Gunnar Wetterberg’s proposal for a Nordic federation, put forward in the winter of 2009 in Dagens Nyheter and later expanded upon in a pamphlet, The United Nordic Federation. He argues well, objectively, and persuasively for the advantages to the Nordic countries of a formalized partnership, contending that the countries could gain international influence commensurate with their aggregate size. In a united federation, the countries could be represented in the G20 and other international forums, although he does not clarify what policies would be pursued in these contexts. The Nordic countries already have a greater international presence than their modest size would dictate. The combined population of the Nordic countries, 26 million, is not much larger than that of a single German federal state as North Rhine-Westphalia, but they play a much greater role internationally. Wetterberg also wisely saves his thoughts about the historical barriers to a formalized federation for the end of the book, not to mention the issue of where the capital city would be. It does not take a great deal of imagination to foresee the fight between Stockholm, which has successfully marketed itself as the “Capital of Scandinavia”, and Copenhagen, which cannot achieve consensus among the suburban municipalities of Zealand — let alone its own administration — on any subject whatsoever. The obvious choice of a third city is not much more likely. And the geographical center of the geographical Nordic region from Greenland in the west to Karelia (and Estonia) in the east, Tórshavn on the Faeroe Islands, has slim chance, unless such a choice was able to remove the emotional significance of the idea of a capital city. And that would be no easy thing in countries so intensely nationalist as the Nordic nations.19

In the 1960s, the Nordic states demonstrated their incapacity and lack of interest in supporting Nordic culture and language. Today, the need is greater than it’s ever been since the two Nordic multinational states of Denmark and Sweden were separated into national states in 1809 and 1814. This separation process, at least in relation to Denmark, will not come to an end until the Faeroe Islands and Greenland have determined their political futures. The Nordic region is fascinating, multifaceted, and a worthy task for wise Europeans in the area we should perhaps call “Northern Europe” rather than the ideologically charged “Norden”. But there is little reason to conceive of the Nordic countries, or Norden, as constituting an exceptional region or a permanent alliance in the EU. We are European countries, for good or ill. And as the other EU member states become relatively smaller and more closely aligned while maintaining or accentuating their distinctive national characteristics, the special relationship between the Nordic countries will probably become less significant, provided that the European project does not disintegrate due to the financial crisis and the problems associated with the euro. Regardless of what lies ahead, the Nordic countries started down their separate paths in 1814, when the Oldenburgian state became the biggest European loser in the Napoleonic wars only a few years after 1809, when Sweden had for a short period been reduced to a small state in danger of being carved up by its neighbors.≈

The project belongs in the closed loop of the Ego-, Alter-, and Aliusculture — both this investigation and IKEA’s marketing strategies themselves: they both deal with what we have absorbed, through social and cultural images, from constructions of the Self and the Other. We believe in defined identities. We accept inherited conventions as genetic, as biological truths.

We commend the author for having risked entering this field; it speaks to her courage, maybe her boldness — I do not want to say that daring plays a role here, for her analysis of IKEA’s advertising strategy in Germany is all too convincing and also too scholarly for that. In other words, you do not get bored while reading her work and creativity plays its part: these are good, and essential, prerequisites for successful scholarship. But you have to know in advance that this work does not belong to the mainstream of Swedish German studies: the thesis cannot be attributed to a Swedish tradition in the humanities, either in its methodology or in its content, not even in relation to its theme.

When I look at the list of Swedish German studies dissertations during the last few years, I rarely, in fact never, find a dissertation that could compete with Jennie Mazur’s work, whether in its method, its theory, or even its content.

The article is written in German, but it is not really a German academic treatise. The author uses a relaxed style, a writing style that is not precisely academic in the traditional, let alone Teutonic sense. I see that as an advantage, with the crucial prerequisite that the language is appropriate for the subject and that it has differentiated depths. One can say this about her prose: it is simple, it is occasionally flat when she is talking about the simple and flat plots of the little IKEA films; however, it becomes differentiated and abstract when she evaluates and analyzes what she has seen. This is the case in her chapters on culture and semiotics: when she reviews the research literature, her language, though still relaxed and flowing, becomes differentiated and abstract.

In a fairly long preface, the readers are acquainted with the subject of the investigation; the author recounts, in an offhand, ironic way, an IKEA commercial that is all too well known in Germany. It shows a few German stereotypes, with the critical aim of exploiting them by building them, in accordance with advertising psychology, into a contrasting Swedish sales strategy. I would like to delve a little deeper here, because quite clearly IKEA is working with German clichés. The author analyzes this; German seriousness and Swedish irony are set in opposition to each other.

In the Germany of IKEA, strange names are in circulation (for people and products): “Ewald” and “Rosalinda”, for example. These names are so unusual and so rarely used that they seem to me to be a witty way of showing distance rather than irony. That is not a rebuttal of the arguments laid out here, but rather suggests how over-the-top the IKEA strategy is.

And the supposedly classic “German” living room with its heavy oak furniture seems to me to miss the German reality of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries so completely that, at first glance, I would have my doubts about the benefits of sales psychology. In the living rooms of the German lower and lower-middle classes — and hence of potential IKEA customers — there is no such furniture. This view comes 100 years too late.

The IKEA clientele is distinguished above all by — apart from its low budget — a certain youthfulness, with the attitude to life that goes along with it. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and (somewhat later) ABBA, Sjöwall/Wahlöö — but above all, the protest against the entrenched, to a considerable extent political and habitual rituals of the “older generation” were part of this attitude towards life when IKEA came to Germany at the beginning of the 1970s; to this extent, IKEA in Germany should also be interpreted as part of the rebellion against parents. We hear again and again that it is because of the protest by Helmut Schmidt that the cult shelving unit “Billy,” which was produced from 1974 until 1991, appeared on the market again two years later (“Without Billy you won’t get rid of your pine junk!”). Since then, “Billyfizierung” (“Billyfying”) has become a familiar term.

The first part of the monograph is of solid scholarly quality: the research question is introduced, we are led to the theoretical starting point, and, perhaps most importantly, an overview of the previous research on IKEA, and the cultural-semiotic interpretation of images of ourselves and of others are provided. A longish first chapter is devoted to discussion and the thematic rationale for studying IKEA commercials. In these brief thirty pages, Jennie Mazur takes a good look at the mechanisms of advertising; she rightly emphasizes that advertising has become a distinct and recognized form of culture and art: advertising has become part of our everyday communication. The actual purpose of advertising, to attract people to buy something, has long been complemented, at times transcended, even completely supplanted by its function as entertainment and culture vehicle. The tension created by these multiple functions of advertising is what attracts scholarly examination, but it brings with it great risks when companies transfer national cultural conventions, even those specific to their own country, to other settings. When a Swedish company advertises its products in Germany, or an American company advertises its goods in France, then the limits of understanding and especially of acceptance are soon reached. One example of this is the names of products — a product’s name does not always have to attract buyers by using words outside their own language. (One example of this is “Söder”; another is that Danish people feel insulted because doormats and carpets have, without exception, been given Danish names.

Nonetheless, as we learn from this work, advertising is not static, even in the case of a worldwide company that over many years has become accustomed to success. While the “German” IKEA advertising campaign began in 1974 with the national branding slogan “The impossible furniture store from Sweden” (Das unmögliche Möbelhaus aus Schweden), since the 1980s a new tagline has been created almost every two years. The most successful has been an aphorism in Germany for funny situations since 2002 which, completely separate from IKEA, has its own existence in colloquial language: “Wohnst du noch oder lebst du schon?” — which plays on the two different meanings of “live”: “Are you still just living somewhere?” or “Are you alive (do you feel alive yet)?”

Another chapter, one that I would consider to be actually the theoretical one, is about the concept of culture: culture cannot be defined, and equally, we cannot live without it. It is like “time” or “identity” — we are clearly dealing with everyday concepts that come up in our everyday reality without further definition, but we cannot truly grasp their meaning. Jennie Mazur avoids the problem adroitly by pointing to relevant authorities, beginning with the classics of semiotics and linguistic definition of signs: “Signs define the world we live in”; a sign is the correlation between expression and content, and this brings us to the heart of culture, for expression and content can be modified within a given culture. Then the author differentiates between everyday culture and culture in research; she has expressed her understanding of culture with the quote from Malinowski that she has set as the slogan for her study: culture “as the widest context of human behavior” — where the emphasis on behavior is at best annoying, for culture is also the expression of a way of thinking and of political self-image; political culture is more than political behavior. How can it be otherwise — and the author does not attempt to solve this puzzle — that in German there is a Kulturbeutel (a culture bundle), in English simply a toilet bag, in French a trousse de toilette, in Spanish el neceser? In the language of semiotics, culture is (and I quote) “collective knowledge, system of signs, order, structure”. Thus, in reality, culture extends far beyond “behavior”. This is in reality the essential prerequisite for being able to investigate the IKEA commercials in terms of an analysis of semiotic culture.

The genesis and constructions of the respective national cultures are of central importance for an examination of this sort: we have already recently learned that Scandinavians’ image of Scandinavia has been significantly influenced by the German image of the North: the Germans had constructed their ideal picture of an idyllic North and had taken it to Scandinavia, where it became established as their own image. If I translate that correctly into semiotic language, over decades the German Alter-culture of Scandinavia became the Swedish Ego-culture. To that extent, Sweden sells Germans their own original image of Sweden, the German Alter-culture as Swedish Ego-culture: this is the company’s “Swedish solution” — which can function so successfully only in Germany. The two-way paths of image and identity construction are thus not only of the immaterial world but are also entirely tangible, economic ones.

Der Spiegel puts together this list of stereotypes from 1969:

“Drugs and pornography, prisons without doors and girls without morals, boredom and short skirts, hot love and cool people — that is the average German’s image of Sweden.”

Stereotypes like this always have a funny, lighthearted side; they make it possible for us to see that they can change: the “Swedish film”, which came into fashion in the 1950s as an umbrella term for films considered pornographic, had a quite different connotation in the 1930s — it meant the filmic depiction of nature! “Swedish film” stood for “nature film”, or, as the case may be, scenes that took place in free, primordial nature.

The “Swedish solution” — the description, deciphering, and evaluation of five IKEA commercials — is the climax of the dissertation; the author gives them each their own title: “Frankenstein”, “Knut”, “Froschkönig der Mittsommerzeit”, “Eine gewaltige Gardenparty”, and “Neuheiten bei Oma”. She examines the commercials minutely, describing the techniques and the content. Her summary, “The Swedish Solution”, is an “IKEA solution”; it has as much to do with Sweden as the Germans permit — and that is a lot! IKEA has cult status for its southern neighbors with a construction of Swedishness that no doubt is entrenched in a good part of Germany.

But what is happening with IKEA in France, in Russia, in England? As far as furniture is concerned, IKEA has at least managed to modernize the German living room — if it were to manage that in Russia, too, that would also be a cultural revolution. At the same time, however, we must remember that the sorcerer’s apprentices from time to time have the upper hand and can no longer be put back behind bars, or, as Helmut Schmidt put it: If “Billy” does not return, you will be stuck with all your pine junk. The wit and irony that has fascinated the Germans for nearly 40 years is not a Swedish specialty; Swedes are just as serious and humorless as the Germans — nevertheless, we would really like to believe that they are not.

Jennie Mazur’s Die “schwedische” Lösung provides a good example of a scholarly critical investigation of Self- and Other-images in terms of culture. In connection with the use of concepts such as highlight or headline, we should return to the term “icons”, in this case “iconic films”. Aby Warburg’s treatment of popular-culture techniques and nomenclature could also be of use in this connection and would complete the semiotic analyses. On the basis of a large amount of evidence, the dissertation illuminates just how ubiquitous the heterostereotypical and autostereotypical constructions of the National — or of what is considered the National — have become. It has long been known in the context of national product branding that making money is not the only thing that can be done with these constructions; this study demonstrates that a lot of money can be made.≈

Semenenko’s monograph is the third in a series edited by Marcel Danesi, professor of semiotics and anthropology at the University of Toronto. Danesi’s explanation of the series title, Semiotics and Popular Culture, deserves attention: “It engages with theory and technical trends to expose the subject matter clearly, openly, and meaningfully.” Could it be that the three adverbs hint at contrasting efforts to expose the subject matter obscurely, surreptitiously, and nonsensically? Danesi’s series preface confirms such an interpretation: “Although written by scholars and intellectuals, each book will look beyond the many abstruse theories that have been put forward to explain popular culture”. Professor Danesi and his authors are evidently fighting for enlightenment about popular culture. That engagement implies a clear concept of low and high culture.

Semiotics, originally associated with Saussure’s linguistics and philosophers like Charles S. Peirce and Edmund Husserl, has since penetrated our common knowledge and everyday language. Along the way, semiotic terms have lost their precise definitions. Accordingly, some scholars spread opinions that obscure Yuri Lotman’s studies. Aleksei Semenenko mentions two publications in particular. In 2003, Krista Ebert reduced the importance of Lotman’s work at TMSS to a phenomenon relevant only to the study of Soviet culture. In Ebert’s view, Lotman appears as the propagator of an “anticulture that undermines the monopoly of the ideological culture” (quoted in Semenenko, p. 19). Andreas Schönle and Jeremy Shine follow a similar line in their introduction to Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions, published in 2006. Semenenko pronounces a harsh verdict: “It is noteworthy that the authors conceive of culture quite differently from Lotman, listing various facets of life that make up culture as a whole — ‘political, economic, social, erotic, and ideological’ — but this list does not include ‘artistic’ or any other terms that are central in Lotman’s works.” In this light one understands better why Semenenko found it necessary to write his own introduction.

Another opinion rebuked by Semenenko sounds particularly strange to scholars of Slavic literatures in Germany and other European countries. When Lotman’s books on structural poetics and semiotics were published in the seventies and eighties, they were attentively studied in the light of Russian formalism, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, and linguistic and semiotic achievements since Saussure. Lotman’s approaches to literature not only delivered new analytical tools, but also widened our cultural horizon. Yet his reception by English scholars, apart from Ann Shukman, is marked by indifference, as Semenenko notes: “[T]he marginality of Lotman’s theory in English books on semiotics of culture is rather noticeable”. Igor’ A. Chernov, in his “Opit vvedeniia v sistemu Iu. M. Lotmana” [Attempt at an introduction to Y. M. Lotman’s system], first published in 1982 and republished in 2012, describes why Soviet scholars were initially hostile to semiotics. They regarded semiotics as an ideological weapon of the Western capitalist class against the working people. Later, when the government needed linguists and specialists in computer science for military and industrial production, the ideologically motivated hostility gave way to financial and institutional support, and attacks against semiotics were thenceforth more or less suppressed. Lotman and many other researchers at TMSS profited over a long period from this ideological shift. Reading Semenenko’s book, one gets the impression that the blindness that once characterized Soviet-Russian ideologists has now befallen scholars in the capitalist West.

Such blindness occurs not only in English-speaking contexts. During the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, academic discussions about semiotics disappeared in Europe too. Cultural studies at universities now draws inspiration from other sources. Governments favor comparative studies in cultural stereotypes, seemingly philosophical or psychological studies under headings such as “I and the Other” or “The Familiar and the Foreign” and, more recently, so-called regional studies. All this keeps our students busy and leads them away from true semiotics of culture.

Semenenko’s book reconstructs Yuri Lotman’s intellectual development from traditional historian and philologist to innovative structuralist and semiotician. The book’s main thesis fights against the idea shared by many Lotman specialists that a rift exists between Lotman’s structural and semiotic phases. Where others see a break, Semenenko observes a continuous and systematic widening of Lotman’s initial thought. The four main chapters of the book — “Culture as System”, “Culture as Text”, “Semiosphere”, and “Universal Mind” — try to demonstrate Semenenko’s thesis. These chapters, numbered 2 to 5, are preceded by an introduction and a first chapter called “Contexts”.

Also valuable are the notes, where the reader finds additional information about the history of semiotic terms. In note 4 on chapter 3, “Culture as Text”, for example, Semenenko explains the exact meaning of “sign” and “model” in Lotman’s conception: whereas the sign is an icon of the referential object, the model is a transformation of the object on a more abstract level. Most important is also Note 1 on chapter 5, “Universal Mind”, which quotes C. S. Peirce: “Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystal, and throughout the physical world”. This attribution of thought to the world outside the human intellect has influenced the conception of signs and communication in modern computer science. Lotman differentiates, with reference to the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, between communicational connections in non-human and human semiotic spheres.

What one misses in the chapters as well as in the notes is a mention of dialectics. In his pamphlet-like article “Literaturovedenie dolzhno byt’ naukoi” (Literary studies must be a science), written in 1967, Lotman declares: “The methodological ground of structuralism is dialectics.”1 He refers to Paul Lafargue, who praised Karl Marx for his insight into the connection between dialectics and mathematics. This was of course a helpful argument against ideological opponents in the Soviet Union. But aside from that topical discussion, one should not ignore that dialectics and mathematics also characterize Russian formalism and Prague structuralism, two schools that are part of Lotman’s intellectual heritage. Members of these schools dissected the work of art into sets of elements and described their functions inside and outside the work. Dialectical thinking in the tradition of G. W. F. Hegel, Marx’s intellectual forebear, became particularly prominent in Prague aesthetics. Perhaps Semenenko wanted to forestall English-speaking readers’ distrust in Lotman’s structuralism and semiotics, and therefore chose not to mention this nonetheless important gnoseological tradition (to use Lotman’s expression).

Let me turn now to a few crucial topics. In chapter 2, “Culture as System”, Lotman’s links with Russian formalism and Mikhail Bakhtin become most obvious. The formalists observed a two-layered structure in the literary work, which they called the sign of a sign or the second-degree sign. The ethnologist Petr Bogatyrev introduced the term to the Prague linguistic circle. The first-degree sign comes from communicative language. In literature, this sign functions as the material basis of the second-degree sign, whose construction follows purely artistic devices that deform the basis. As a result, literature cannot function like the practical communicative system of natural language. It serves its own specific function, called the aesthetic function.

Semenenko describes how Lotman changes this formalist concept into his “secondary modeling system”. The new name indicates that the underlying sign of conventional language is not merely deformed, but transformed into a totally different sign type, the icon. The work as a whole delivers a “world-model”, that is, a new vision of man in his world and in the universe. The iconic sign not only belongs to works of art, but can also be found in myths, rituals, and magic. The question whether such signs are indeed secondary to language, or whether they must be regarded as primary signs, is discussed in depth by Semenenko. From the European perspective, one is tempted to mention André Jolles’s distinction between oral “einfache Formen” (simple forms) and their literary transformations. Jolles’s ideas come close to Bakhtin’s “recheviie zhanry” (speech genres; cf. Semenenko pp. 50, 88 ff.). Neither Jolles nor Bakhtin classifies these genres as icons. Problems connected with the difference between the icon in literary art and the icon in myths, rituals, and magic are discussed in the third chapter.

It was mostly Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism (dialogichnost’, sometimes translated as “dialogicity”) that inspired Lotman to define interaction between different semiotic systems as a kind of dialogue. Let us recall that neither Bakhtin’s nor Lotman’s concept of dialogism conforms to what a linguist means by dialogue. Where the linguist compares the semantic accumulation in dialogic utterances with the quite different accumulation in monologue, the theorist of culture is interested in the mutual openness or closure of systems and subsystems. Bakhtin and Lotman prefer openness to closure. Such a preference does not make sense to a linguist, for whom each of the two types of utterances has its justification with respect to its function in a communicative situation. As Semenenko repeatedly points out, Lotman often uses terms borrowed from other disciplines in a vague, metaphorical way. In the case of dialogism, better insight into the metaphorical transposition of dialogue to the level of systems would have reduced the confusion that has surrounded that term since Bakhtin’s time, and better enabled the reader to understand the section “Explosions in Culture”. As an example of such an “explosion”, Semenenko takes the political revolt of the Decabrists in the early nineteenth century. Lotman analyzed the Decabrist movement as the result of the confrontation between the hierarchical political system of tsarist Russia and the more egalitarian system favored by young intellectuals. Instead of opening their minds toward these new political ideas from Western Europe, the governing forces closed themselves up. The chance for a gradual evolution by mutual approximation was lost, and Russia sank back into an age of social and intellectual darkness. The example shows that closed systems tend towards inner, doubtless unhealthy explosions. Yet systems as such cannot discuss with one another: human speakers are needed who lay bare their ideas point by point, looking for convergences and divergences in order to find a viable bridge between the two sides. This is where true dialogue comes into play. Openness of systems is only a prerequisite to human dialogue.

The title of the third chapter, “Culture as Text”, announces a new phase in Lotman’s thinking. The underlying idea is that a cultural type can be regarded as one text. Each individual text belonging to the given cultural type is a variation on the invariants, the whole set of invariants constituting what is called the text of that culture. The methodological inspiration is derived from text linguistics, but, as in the case of dialogism, the linguistic terms are applied on a level that is alien to linguistics, called the level of ideas or worldview. The kind of research connected with the conception and the analytical method of “culture as text” can be fruitfully applied in literary analysis, as Lotman demonstrated in his works on Russian literature. In his 1981 article “Semiotics of Culture and the Concept of Text”, he criticizes the tendency of semiotic studies to “‘focus on models and models of models’”, i. e. the tendency towards increasing abstraction. He preferred the opposite current, focusing “on the semiotic functioning of actual texts”. Lotman tried to overcome the limited view of literature propagated by the adherents of realism by showing that realism is an invariant to which many periods of cultural history contributed their variants.

I see a weakness in the way Semenenko tries to explain the concept of “culture as text” as a single sign. The point I have in mind is connected with Semenenko’s thesis that there is a continuity in Lotman’s semiotic thinking. One would expect the form and function of the crucial concept of the secondary modeling system, exposed in “Culture as System”, to be discussed further in “Culture as Text”. Yet even in “Culture as System”, Semenenko states, “the term secondary modeling system is problematic and produces more questions than answers”. Does this mean Lotman drops the term when a culture is envisaged as a single text? Or does Lotman not rather consider a third level of sign-construction, which rests on the first and second levels constituted by the secondary modeling system? That third level allows him to characterize the specific, sometimes revolutionary function fulfilled by the literary work vis-à-vis the dominant cultural type, as in the case of the Decabrists, inspired by Romantic European and Russian literature.

Lotman’s idea about the literary text as a single sign figures in Jan Mukařovský’s articles “Dénomination poétique et la fonction esthétique de la langue” (1938) and “K sémantice básnického obrazu” [On the semantics of the poetic image] (1947). In his 1973 article “O soderzhanii i structure poniatiia ‘chudozhestvennaia literatura’” [On the content and structure of the concept “artistic literature”], Lotman names Mukařovský, together with Yuri Tinianov and Mikhail Bakhtin, as the predecessors who evaluated the literary work of art as a dynamic factor in culture. The Prague aesthetician analyzed the dynamic cultural function of literature in the 1934 article “L’art comme fait sémiologique”. The two later articles describe the specific technique by which the poetic work transforms the manifold verbal signs of the text into one global denomination and one sign. Following this line, Lotman’s concept of the secondary modeling system in combination with culture as text delivers a parallel to and a continuation of the research done in Prague. Semenenko mentions the Prague school in connection with Saussure, but he seems to ignore the fact that Jan Mukařovský’s aesthetics paved the way for modern studies in the semiotics of the arts, including literature, architecture, theater, painting, and film.

The last two chapters present the ideas which will forever be connected with the name of Yuri M. Lotman. In chapter 4, Semenenko discusses the term “semiosphere”, from Lotman’s famous title, in connection with the semiotic space. While “semiosphere” is linked with theories about genetic semiosis in general, “semiotic space” deals with the specifics of the semiotic processes accessible to biological classes of beings. According to Jakob von Uexküll, beings (organisms) are bound to the limited Umwelt of their class. The borders of the Umwelt can not be transcended: “Consequently, an organism will not be able to perceive any signs or texts that are not part of his Umwelt” (quoted in Semenenko, p. 116). Von Uexküll’s term Umwelt hints at the blindness of every being to the worlds of classes other than his own. The human being is no exception, and, even worse, the same blindness separates different human cultures, even though the genetic dispositions of all humans are identical. Yet the human being is able to imagine Umwelten outside his own. That imagination, the field of literature and the other arts, can lead to an intuitive understanding of other cultural worlds, or experimental contacts between man and nature. Semenenko rightly observes that Lotman’s vision of cultures in contact, “which together constitute the semiosphere as a whole”, is rooted in the Enlightenment era. One would have wished for a more detailed presentation of that early philosophical and semiotic tradition. Perhaps the limited space of Semenenko’s book and his focus on modern semiotics only permitted a few hints.

Chapter 5, “Universal Mind”, presents two divergent lines of research at TMSS: that of cybernetics, also called artificial intelligence (AI), associated with the name of Norbert Wiener; and that of neurological studies connected with Lev S. Vygotski and his pupil Viacheslav V. Ivanov, the latter a professor and colleague of Lotman in TMSS. Lotman and his team of philologists were charged with the elaboration of a metalanguage that would unite these lines. Yet it turned out that Lotman’s project “was just a cover that allowed Tartu scholars to conduct their own research which had only a remote relation to the problem of AI or the moon exploration. It was not entirely unexpected when in 1976 the officials terminated all side contracts with literary scholars in Tartu and Leningrad”. So this fifth and last chapter is about a fascinating phase in the history of TMSS and Yuri Lotman.

The reason for the rupture between Lotman and the officials was their different positioning of human and artificial signs. Whereas researchers engaged with AI attributed the central position to artificial signs suitable for communication between machines, and conceded only a marginal position to human language signs, Lotman was inclined to invert the relation. Lotman’s argumentation is interesting in a philosophical respect: He referred to the contrasting roles of error in human cognition and in artificial intelligence. Error fulfils a positive function in cognition inasmuch as it reminds man of his blindness within his Umwelt and warns him against excessive self-confidence, which could result in stupidity. Error in the thinking machine, on the other hand, destroys its value. Lotman argues that natural language renders the human being superior to the machine. Semenenko concludes: “Among all other forms of semiotic expression, natural language takes the central position as the most powerful system”.

To conclude, I should like to mention a parallel in the United States to Lotman’s precarious situation at the TMSS. Joseph Weizenbaum, a mathematician who worked for a long period in Pentagon projects and at MIT, described in many critical publications how specialists in computer science were trained in the technique of ignoring the social and political environment of their work. The constructive deficit of the computer — its lack of contact with the real Umwelt — was thus transferred to the human mind. Professor Weizenbaum lists a number of scientific terms that now flood our common-sense language, where they produce a new kind of brainwashing: “artificial intelligence” is, according to Weizenbaum, no intelligence at all; “virtual space” reinforces a dangerous abstraction from real life; “computer art” is a product of mere chance, devoid of any creativity. As an example of a concept which fatally lost its original signification, he mentions Einstein’s theory of “relativity”, abused to propagate relativistic ethics and epistemology. A more recent example of such abuse is chaos theory and the “butterfly effect”. “Cloud theory”, currently propounded by postmodernists in the humanities, could be added to the list of abused terms. However, one difference between Lotman’s and Weizenbaum’s positions must not be forgotten: Weizenbaum’s critiques (paralleled at MIT by the linguist Noam Chomsky’s investigations of American imperialist policy) were published immediately, while Lotman’s critical studies remained hidden in the archives for some twenty years.

Weizenbaum’s books could well figure in Danesi’s series on “Popular Culture”. One obstacle is of course the fact that “semiotics” in the traditional sense of the term is not Weizenbaum’s specialty. Yet the reader of Aleksei Semenenko’s Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory finds many similar arguments in Lotman’s and Weizenbaum’s pleading for human language, literature, and arts, and the expurgation of mystifications from our culture.≈

Grossman (1905—1964) had of course been one of the devoted, politically correct journalists in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. As a war correspondent, he covered the Red Army’s battles and slow progress westward after the appalling setback that dealt such a vicious blow to the Jewish population of the old Russian Empire, his own people. He wrote an early exposé, an on-the-spot report, from a German death camp; his short stories of the years of ruin, when all of Eastern Europe seemed on the brink of destruction, are gripping literature and profound works of art.

The Road, a volume of collected works, presents Grossman writ small. Laconic, suggestive, with large, meaningful points between the lines. Grossman’s prose is light, like a butterfly. The subjects of the first suite are the birth of the young Soviet state and its struggle to survive. Especially striking is the prominent place of women in the social life depicted — including women in leading positions. The story about the young political commissar who, quartered in a Jewish home as the Russian-Polish war raged (1919—1921), gives birth after the infant’s father had fallen in battle and leaves her newborn behind when the Red Guards go on the counter-offensive, is unforgettable — as a document of the times, and as art.

The second section is framed by the Second World War and the Jewish plight under Nazi occupation. A provincial teacher who meets his cruel fate never having lost his illusions seems to me the embodiment of the lot of an entire people. Although some of the later short stories allude to Nazism and the hatred of Jews, the most powerful among them are a couple that provide glimpses into the Soviet human soul. “Mama” for instance, based on the authentic and proven story of the adoption of an orphan by the NKVD boss Nikolai Yezhov and his wife, and the girl’s unglamorous adventures after the execution of her father and the suicide (in reality) of her mother. The terror of the epoch resides in glances and gestures, not physical torture and bloodletting. Grossman’s rage becomes most palpable when he holds back; he has no need to display it.

In an appendix to the book, “the girl” was allowed, in 2010, the year of publication, to give her version of the brief time she spent in the Yezhov family. To her, this prince of the Terror, who ultimately became its victim, was a loving and caring adult who made sure the child was given everything she needed. She went so far as to try, without success, to have her adoptive father rehabilitated as a prisoner of the system. She also suffered for his sake, although actually only in that she was sent back to an orphanage and could not choose a profession in the music world, as she would have preferred.

Suffering is relative.

Grossman lost his own mother to the ravages of German SS troops in his home city and he felt guilty to the end of his days for not having done more to get his mother out in time. Two letters to his mother, written long after her murder, are elegiac in a manner otherwise unlike this writer. When he is close to death, he can unleash, as in a few lovely graveyard meditations written shortly before his own passing, his sense of humor and his quiet irony; in this story there is an almost ribald passage about bearded “private priests” with long, red noses who will, in exchange for a glass of vodka or, even better, several, agree to hold a funeral oration for the chief mourners — drunkards of a kind who would otherwise be consigned to parasitism, as the society would later condemn one Joseph Brodsky.

One long text in The Road differs from all the others. The war correspondent Vasily Grossman was one of the first to write about a concentration camp after having been on site and making personal observations. His article about Treblinka is an indictment. The bombast (otherwise absent from Grossman’s prose) is there to soothe indescribable anguish. Sharply, piercingly, the writer reconstructs the industrial killing; he characterizes a few of the murderers and when he imagines the innocent victims he becomes painfully physical.

“Hell in Treblinka” was written in the heat of the moment and there was of course a rush to get out the information after the Soviet Army’s liberation of this piece of Polish ground. The camp had by then already been destroyed by the German murderers. Unfortunately, Grossman’s estimations of the number of dead are wildly exaggerated. He reports three million murdered in this camp alone; the actual figure is well under eight hundred thousand — a horrific figure in its own right. But the error reminds us that war reportage (like biased testimony) is a shaky foundation for establishing historical truth. Propaganda is a mighty force that does not always have any relationship to the facts. However, the editor and translator Robert Chandler has appended exemplary notes to the Treblinka article, as well as to the rest of the selections, which are based on the most recent literature in the field.

Everything Flows was written after the post-Stalinist authorities had obstructed the publication of Life and Fate. Grossman continued working as a writer for the Soviet press, but none of his literary works could be published until a couple of decades after his death, when the generation of leaders who were molded politically and professionally during the Stalin era were leaving the stage. Robert Chandler may be right in his suspicion that Grossman might have fallen victim to the repression in connection with the hysterical campaign against cosmopolitanism and the so-called Doctors’ Plot (a way of eliminating the still-vigorous Jewish element in Soviet society) if not for the sudden death in March 1953 of the holder of ultimate power, Joseph Stalin.

The posthumously published book is structured in scenes. In one of the first, the foreground is taken by the problem of the anti-Jewish purges within the Soviet intelligentsia. Sympathizers won honor and admiration that would not otherwise have been theirs. The protagonist of Everything Flows, Ivan Grigoryevich, has just been released from the gulag after twenty years. He arrives in Moscow and visits his cousin, who has achieved career success and a place in the scientific academy through profiting by the persecution of Jewish colleagues. Grigoryevich had himself been a promising scientist who made criminal statements during his student years and was shipped away to serve hard labor. All the characters are prematurely gray. Who lives in the greatest distress, the free or the imprisoned, remains an unanswered question. Who is without guilt? The prisoners who squeal under painful interrogation? And is he who voluntarily informs not also a victim of the torture afflicted upon the entire society by the state and its institutions?

Few works of 20th century fiction can measure up to Everything Flows when it comes to questions of morality. It is not an indictment; it is a coming to terms — with, among other things, the writer’s own experience, the writer’s own possible complicity. Like a good reporter, Grossman has gathered material from camp life in outer Siberia, the mass famine in Ukraine in the early years of the 1930s, the torture in the interrogation cells, the many layers of Glanz und Elend in the life of society. The present is the time just before Khrushchev’s thaw, the many amnesties and returns after Stalin’s death (quite a few, as we know, preferred to stay in their places of exile, as they had nowhere to return to). But the past is always present, in monologs, in dialogs, in fictional legal settlements. Who, then, has any right to pass judgment in such a society? Are not the judge, the prosecutor, public opinion also tainted, and in some sense guilty? Ivan Grigoryevich’s first love betrayed him when he was taken away, and married someone else; his second and last love — the woman who allows him to board with her while he performs his lowly job as a metal worker — feels that she too has betrayed others when, as a young party activist, she stood helpless before the outrages and cruel mismanagement during the forced collectivizations. Her long, night-time confessions, sitting on the edge of the bed, have a realism that surpasses the descriptions of Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, which is no small praise. And naturally, for this otherwise would not have been a great and tragic Russian book, this woman is also taken from him, by lung cancer.

The discussion in the final chapter of Lenin’s ominous role in Russian modernization, his encapsulation in the thousand-year Russian history of serfdom and subjection is — I was about to say, as sharp as a knife. Because if there is something that has characterized our time, according to Grossman, it is that particular instrument, the surgeon’s knife, that is “the 20th century’s true theoretician, its greatest philosophical leader”. Through his ascetic nature, Lenin could persist in a modernization project that precluded all thoughts of individual freedom. He never argued to persuade, but always to bully. He had sacrificed himself for the revolution (exhausted and paralyzed, he died at 54), and thus the sacrifices of others were not more worthy than his. In this way, Bolshevism became a kind of philosophy of decline: “This was not nourishment for the healthy. It was a narcotic for failures, for the sick and the weak, for the backward and beaten.” Is this simply a lack of civility? “In Russia, there is virtually no such thing as manners,” wrote Nikolai Leskov long before (in A Decayed Family).

“Lenin’s synthesis of non-freedom and socialism”, Grossman writes in a wholly unexpected turn, “stupefied the world more than the discovery of nuclear energy.”

Everything Flows is a voyage of discovery to a barbarism that Grossman refuses to attribute to the realm of necessity. People must become accustomed to choosing, in the midst of their despair: choosing their inclinations, their time, their work, their friends. That is the way out of slavery. And it will demand sacrifice. But that is not the business of this book.≈

In 1986, a Russian-language publishing house in the United States brought out the first edition of Semyon Lipkin’s memoir, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. Lipkin wrote that in 1961  — after the “arrest” of Life and Fate — a translator from Armenian asked him to find her someone who could edit her own word-for-word translation of The Children of the Large House, a war novel by Hrachya Kochar. And Lipkin naturally recommended his close friend, Vasily Grossman.

Kochar’s daughter, however, tells this story differently. According to her, “Vasily Grossman arrived in Yerevan in autumn 1959. This was a difficult time for the writer, after the arrest of Life and Fate. [...] He was both depressed and in financial difficulties. My father had been longing to have The Children of the Large House translated into Russian — and he wanted this to be done by Grossman, whom he worshipped. Vardkes Tevekelyan, the chairman of the Literary Fund, had introduced my father to Grossman.”

The contradictions between these two accounts are glaring. Lipkin makes out that it was thanks to his mediation that Grossman was able to travel to Armenia and earn money there; according to Lipkin, it was only when Grossman was already in Armenia that he first met Kochar. Mary Kochar, however, states that the two writers were brought together by the chairman of the Armenian section of the Literary Fund, a powerful organization that decided almost all the financial matters of the Armenian section of the Soviet Writers’ Union. A commission from the Literary Fund would have been very important; there would certainly have been no need for Lipkin’s mediation.

Mary Kochar does, of course, get the date wrong. It was in February 1961 that Life and Fate was arrested, and in autumn of 1961, not 1959, that Grossman travelled to Armenia. Mistakes of this nature, however, are common enough in memoirs, and this particular mistake in no way invalidates the rest of her account.

It goes without   saying that Lipkin’s and Kochar’s accounts cannot both be accurate. It is, however, possible that both are inaccurate, that the truth is somewhat different from either of these versions.

Since the mid-1950s Grossman had been an acknowledged master. His articles about the war were being republished again and again, and the first of his two Stalingrad novels, For a Just Cause, was seen as a classic. Few people knew about the “arrest” of Life and Fate, and Grossman’s public reputation remained intact. He could, in principle, have begun again. He could have written another novel like For a Just Cause. He could have produced a fully revised and self-censored version of Life and Fate. This, admittedly, would no longer have been Life and Fate — but no one was preventing him from following this course.

It is natural to assume that Grossman took on this “translation” because he needed the money. Lipkin writes, “I thought it would be good for Grossman to go to Armenia, and he needed the money badly.” Anna Berzer (the editor from Novy Mir who, in 1990, published another memoir of Grossman, titled Goodbye) says much the same: “He travelled to Armenia [...] because of need and unhappiness.” And Grossman himself wrote to his wife in December 1961, “I am glad that I have managed to extricate myself from material need without getting into debt, without borrowing money from my well-wishers.”

All these statements, however, are puzzling. It is hard to conceive how, in 1961, Grossman can have been in need of money. In 1960 he had received from the journal Znamya an advance against the publication of Life and Fate. We know, from a letter sent to Grossman by the chief secretary of Znamya, that this advance totaled 16,587 rubles and that it was irrevocable. In 1960, this was a large sum.

In 1960 Grossman also published several extracts from Life and Fate in other Soviet periodicals. Given Grossman’s fame as a war novelist, these publications must have been well paid.

And Grossman must have earned other large sums. His articles written as a war correspondent had been republished in 1958, and For a Just Cause had been republished in 1959. And his pre-war novel, Stepan Kol’chugin, had been republished twice, in 1959 and in 1960. During the 1940s and 1950s authors received an average payment of 3000 rubles for each avtorsky list (a print unit of 40,000 letters, spaces and punctuation marks — still the standard Russian system for calculating payments to authors). In view of his eminence, Grossman would almost certainly have been paid more than this average rate. Authors were, admittedly, paid less for work that had been published already, but Grossman would still have received a minimum of 1500—1800 rubles for each print unit. His war journalism constituted thirty of these units, For a Just Cause forty-six, and Stepan Kolchugin over forty-four. Grossman would, therefore, appear to have earned well over 180,000 rubles during the years 1958—60. This was at a time when an average salary was 650 rubles a month and a woman’s coat with a fur collar cost 700 rubles.

Writers’ income during these years was often extraordinarily high; there were dramatists earning more than a million rubles a year. The need for a progressive income tax on writers was, in fact, a frequent topic of discussion in the Communist Party Central Committee. There was, however, no disagreement about the fact that a writer was a representative of the elite — and so was entitled to earn large sums. It is hard to imagine that Grossman, a member of the Writer’s Union since 1937, was living in poverty. All this, however, only raises more questions; it does not help us to understand why Grossman should have taken on a task that, for a writer of his standing, would have been seen as something of a humiliation. It is possible that a clue lies in Anna Berzer’s words about Grossman accepting this commission because of “need and unhappiness”. Berzer’s memoir is written with restraint and she does not discuss Grossman’s personal life, but she would certainly have known that his marriage was close to a complete breakdown. He may simply have been glad of a chance to get away from Moscow.

There are further   complications to the story of Grossman’s work as a “translator”. The Children of the Large House was written in two stages. The first edition was published in Armenian in 1952. This was followed by the publication in 1954, in Armenia, of a Russian translation by Arus’ Tadeosyan; this translation was republished in 1955. Tadeosyan’s translation was not perfect, but it was good enough for its purpose. Some passages of the original were omitted and, by the standards of the time, the print run was small (5000 copies); it seems likely that the literary authorities simply considered it important that the book be published in Russian — the language of the entire Soviet Union — and not only in the language of one of the constituent republics. How many people read the book was of lesser concern.

In 1955 an expanded and re-edited version of Tadeosyan’s translation was published by a major Moscow publishing house, Sovetsky Pisatel’; this time the print run was 15,000 copies. And in 1956 this new version was republished by the no less important military publishing house, Voenizdat. We do not know the print run, because of a gap in the records, but it is sure to have been at least 15,000 copies. Kochar, however, decided at some point to continue to work on his book. In 1959 he published what we now look on as the second part of his novel. This, of course, needed to be translated — and the obvious choice for this task was Tadeosyan. She was qualified and experienced; she specialized in long epics and two of the most prestigious Moscow publishing houses evidently considered her work acceptable. To commission a translation from anyone else would have been a blow both to her reputation and to her income. And as far as the Armenian section of the Writers’ Union was concerned, commissioning a translation from so important a figure as Grossman would have entailed considerable costs. They would have had to pay him a high fee; they would have had to pay his travel and living expenses; and they would have had to arrange for him to visit Armenia’s main sites of cultural interest. He would have been an expensive guest.

It is also surprising that it was thought necessary to ask Grossman to translate not only the second half of the novel but also the first half, which had already been translated. It would have been cheaper, and less insulting to Tadeosyan, to commission Grossman to translate only the second half. And translations by more than one person were, at this time, common enough.

The “arrest” of the manuscript of Life and Fate was a unique event. Usually, the authorities either just censored work they considered dangerous or else arrested the writer himself. The authorities’ treatment of Grossman, however, was entirely logical. Their main concern was to make it absolutely impossible for the novel to be published abroad. In 1956, after all, Pasternak had sent Doctor Zhivago to two Soviet literary journals. After they had refused it, Pasternak had sent the novel abroad. In 1957, it had been published in Milan — and in 1958 Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Grossman’s novel had also been refused by a Soviet literary journal. The authorities had good reason to fear that this might lead to equally catastrophic consequences.

And so the authorities not only told Grossman that his novel was ideologically harmful and therefore unpublishable; they also reminded him that it was his duty to prevent it from being published abroad. This was why they confiscated his manuscripts, and their failure to find every copy is of only secondary importance. What mattered is that Grossman signed a declaration, after his apartment had been searched, to the effect that he possessed no more copies. This meant that any publication of any extract from Life and Fate in an émigré journal would have been a criminal offence — proof that Grossman had misled the KGB. The Soviet authorities had not only locked the book up; they had also turned it into a weapon they could use against its author. No part of it could be published without endangering Grossman and his family.

This was the stick — or, as we Russians say, the whip. What of the carrot — or the gingerbread, its Russian equivalent? This was, after all the Khrushchev era. Recent political liberalization meant that it seemed appropriate to provide Grossman with some kind of compensation for his loss, at least at a material level. And so it was decided to send Grossman to Armenia. He would meet new people and have the chance to visit a new country. He would earn good money. Apart from Life and Fate being under lock and key, everything would be all right for him . . . It seems then that Mary Kochar’s version of the story is more accurate than Semyon Lipkin’s: if Grossman’s commission was organized by the Central Committee, then the person who introduced Grossman to Kochar would have been not Lipkin but Tevekelyan, the chairman of the Armenian Literary Fund.

Grossman’s involvement would also have brought benefits both to Kochar and to the Armenian section of the Writers’ Union. A “translation” by a writer of Grossman’s stature would have greatly enhanced the novel’s status. It would, above all, have given the novel a real chance of winning the most important Soviet literary prize of the time — the Lenin Prize, which had recently been resurrected in place of the now defunct Stalin Prize.

On returning from   his successful and well-paid trip to Armenia, Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, asking for Life and Fate to be returned to him. The Kremlin’s response was to summon Grossman to a meeting with Mikhail Suslov, the member of the Central Committee responsible for matters of ideology. Suslov addressed Grossman as “comrade” and treated him with respect, but he refused to return his novel. It was, he said, a provocative novel, and its publication would bring terrible consequences, for which Grossman would not be forgiven.

The Russian version of The Children of the Large House, credited to Vasily Grossman and Asmik Taronyan (the translator of the literal version from which Grossman worked), was published in Yerevan in 1962. It was republished in Moscow in 1966 and 1971. It then appears to have been forgotten until 1989, when it was republished in a print run of 200,000 copies. And in 1989 — in constrast to earlier years — a large print run truly was an indication of public interest. This, of course, was a consequence of the first Soviet publication, in 1988, of Life and Fate. Grossman’s involvement did indeed — at least in the short term — win Kochar’s novel a huge number of readers. ≈

Why did you start learning Russian?

“No very good reason. I was fifteen, and at a good school. I was extremely good at Latin and Greek, but had made up my mind that I did not want to go on studying what I then saw as ‘dead’ languages. One of my teachers flattered me into taking up Russian: ‘Robert, I really think you should do a difficult language. Why not do Russian?’ But since the Russian teacher, whose name was Count Sollohub, was someone unusually kind, gifted and imaginative, I soon became very interested indeed.”

How did you become a translator?

“Gradually. Soon after graduating from university, I translated one of Andrey Platonov’s versions of a Russian folk tale — simply because I loved the tale and wanted to share it with other people. This was the first piece of work I completed on my own initiative. Then I translated two more of Platonov’s tales, sent them to Faber and was commissioned to translate the remaining three. All six were then published as a children’s book titled The Magic Ring. But during the following twenty years I did many other jobs. It is really only during the past twenty years that I have devoted most of my time to translating.”

How would you describe the particular challenges of translating Russian?

“One challenge is that the freedom of Russian word order enables a writer to make it very clear exactly which words he wants emphasized in any sentence. This makes it easy to reproduce the intonations of living speech on the printed page. It is harder to achieve this in English.”

And now you have translated Khlebnikov. It is a very powerful poem. Could you tell me a little more about it, for example the circumstances under which it was written?

“I have written a little about this poem in my introductory article. I really don’t have a lot more to say. Only that it was written a year or so before his own death  — and that Khlebnikov himself seems to have died largely as a result of malnutrition and a general lack of medical care.”

What made you translate Khlebnikov? Does he have particular relevance to you personally?

“I am at present compiling a large anthology of Russian poetry in translation. It will be titled Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky, and it will include about sixty poets in versions by almost as many different translators. I was not very happy with any of the existing translations of Khlebnihov, so I decided to try my hand at him. I soon realized that — despite his rather intimidating reputation — he is a very approachable poet. Like his contemporary Guillaume Apollinaire, whom I have also translated, he is a natural lyricist.”

Could you explain a little more why you are not happy with existing translations of Khlebnikov?

“I’d rather not. Any successful translation of poetry is a small miracle. I’d rather write about the few good ones than about the many inevitable failures.”

Which would you say are the particular challenges of translating poetry?

“It goes without saying that there is always tension between reproducing the exact meaning and reproducing the music. All the time, one has to struggle to do both. Sometimes this seems impossible and one has to decide which matters most at this particular point in the poem. There are no general answers to these questions.”

Do you think Khlebnikov generally deserves more attention from readers and literary scholars?

“There is a long Russian biography by Sofia Starkina, published in Petersburg in 2005. It looks extremely thorough, but I have not yet had time to read more than a few pages. I’d love to see a shorter book available in English — one that might be of interest to anyone who loves poetry, not just to Russianists. It would not be difficult to create a very appealing book. Khlebnikov was an accomplished artist himself and many of the finest artists of the time drew portraits of him, so there could be lots of illustrations. And there has been too much emphasis on Khlebnikov’s difficulty. Much of his work is very accessible indeed.” ≈

Note: also read Robert Chandlers contribution on Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem about the Volga famine. >>

Velimir Khlebnikov was born in Astrakhan, on the Volga delta, where his father was the official administrator of the Kalmyks, a nomadic Buddhist people who speak a Turkic language. A keen ornithologist, he passed on to his son both an interest in birds — and the language of birds — and an interest in non-European cultures. In 1905, Khlebnikov and one of his elder brothers spent five months on an ornithological expedition in the northern Urals.

Velimir’s mother was   close to some of the most important members of the People’s Will, a populist terrorist organization. Velimir himself studied a variety of subjects — biology, mathematics, natural sciences, Sanskrit and Slavic languages and literature — at both Kazan and Petersburg universities but never completed a degree. After a brief apprenticeship with some of the leading Symbolist poets, he became a central figure in the Russian avant-garde. He contributed to A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, the notorious futurist manifesto which called for Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy “to be thrown overboard from the steamship of modernity”; and he collaborated with David Burliuk, Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov, Natalya Goncharova, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others on a variety of projects including the opera Victory over the Sun (1913). Nevertheless, Khlebnikov seems a somewhat unlikely futurist. While his comrades enjoyed shocking the public, painting their faces and dressing like clowns, he himself was a poor and low-key public performer. A lover of myth and folklore, he wrote poems about mermaids, forest spirits and shamans, often in archaic language. And he wrote movingly about the place of animals in our lives: “Man has taken the surface of the terrestrial globe away from the wise community of beasts and plants and become lonely; he has no one with whom to play tag and blindman’s buff; in an empty room with the darkness of non-existence all around, there is no play and no comrades. Whom is he to have fun with? All around is an empty ‘nothing’. Driven out of their carcasses, the souls of the beasts have thrown themselves into him and inhabited his steppes with their law. They have built beastly cities inside his heart.”2

Khlebnikov welcomed   both the February and October revolutions. Back in Astrakhan he worked for the local military-political newspaper, Red Soldier, and also helped his father to organize a nature reserve in the Volga delta. He spent the last four years of his life wandering. He left Moscow for Kharkov in early 1919, but the city was captured by the Whites, and Khlebnikov only narrowly, by feigning madness, managed to avoid being conscripted into the White Army. In 1920 he took part in the “First Congress of Eastern Peoples” in Baku, on the Caspian Sea. In a letter to his sister Vera, he wrote that in evening classes for the workers, “I announced to the Marxists that I represented Marx squared, and to those who preferred Mohammed I announced that I was the continuation of the teachings of Mohammed, who was henceforth silenced since the Number had now replaced the Word.”3

From Baku Khlebnikov travelled in April 1921 to Persia, as a “lector” in the “Persian Red Army” which had been sent to northern Persia to support a short-lived “Persian Soviet Republic”. There, delighted to be in the East, he wore Persian robes and became known as “the Russian Dervish”. He returned to Russia in August, where he witnessed the terrible Volga famine. At some point he was attacked and robbed, and he lost most of his manuscripts. He died in June 1922, after years of malnutrition and several bouts of both typhus and malaria.

Khlebnikov has much in common with Guillaume Apollinaire. Both poets lived short lives — Apollinaire from 1880 to 1918, Khlebnikov from 1885 to 1922. Both had a gift for drawing, and both were provincials, feted as geniuses when they moved to their country’s capital. Both were close to the greatest visual artists of their time: Apollinaire to Picasso, and Khlebnikov to both Pavel Filonov and Vladimir Tatlin. Both poets remain best known for their more outrageous experiments, but both also wrote many relatively classical poems that embody deep and unexpected perceptions; their early technical experimentation is linked to an openness to experience, to a willingness to follow thoughts and feelings of all kinds wherever they may lead. Like Apollinaire’s, Khlebnikov’s best work is informed by a bold simplicity and deep compassion. Other examples of avant-garde rhetoric — for example, the manifestos of Marinetti — now seem dated. Khlebnikov’s “Appeal to the Governors of the Terrestrial Globe”, however, retains its power — largely because it is so clearly inspired not only by hatred for the ordinary and everyday, but also by a justified horror at the monstrosity of modern industrial warfare. Khlebnikov was admired even by poets with little sympathy for futurism. The classically inclined Mikhail Kuzmin referred to him as “a genius and a man of great vision”. The no-nonsense Nikolay Gumilyov wrote admiringly about his first publications and Osip Mandelstam later wrote, “Every line of his is the beginning of a new long poem. […] What Khlebnikov wrote was not even verses, not even long poems, but a vast all-Russian prayer book or icon case.”

The First World War   put an end to the idea of inevitable human progress in every area of life, but the idea of progress in art has proved surprisingly resilient. Literary and art historians tend to focus on artists’ most innovative work even when it is not their best. Just as Malevich’s Black Square has always attracted more attention than his figurative paintings of the 1930s, so Khlebnikov’s most experimental poems have taken up a disproportionate amount of critics’ attention. The following brief selection represents an attempt to redress this imbalance.

Hunger shows us Khlebnikov at his most compassionate; it may well be the only adequate literary response to the Volga famine of 1921. Another of the many versions of this poem contains the lines: “And their faces are more transparent than windows / so that hunger, like a bearded, self-satisfied landlord, / can look out through a child’s face. / The children are melting.” The only other responses by writers to this famine were non-literary: Maksim Gorky published an appeal to the outside world which led to the creation of the International Committee for Russian Relief, which eventually managed to feed about ten million people. And the twenty-two-year-old Andrei Platonov, who would go on to become the greatest Russian writer of the twentieth century, temporarily abandoned literature for work in land reclamation. “Being someone technically qualified,” he wrote, “I was unable to continue to engage in contemplative work such as literature.”

We are also including a few of Khlebnikov’s finest lyrical poems and a prescient poem about Moscow. The inspiration for this was probably an article by Gorky in the Communist International (December 1920) which includes the sentence, “For Lenin, Russia is only the material for an experiment that has been begun on a world-wide, planetary scale.” My translation of the poem was first published in an appendix to my co-translation of Andrei Platonov’s novel, Happy Moscow. ≈

The Volga Famine

            Hunger (A complete translation of Khlebnikov’s shortened version)

Why are elk and hares leaping through the forest,

making themselves scarce?

People have eaten the bark of poplars,

the green shoots of firs . . .

Women and children wander the forest,

gathering birch leaves

for soup, for broth, for borsch,

the tips of fir trees and silver moss —

food of the forest.

Children, forest scouts,

wander through thickets.

They roast white worms in a bonfire,

wild cabbage and fat caterpillars,

or big spiders — they’re sweeter than nuts.

They catch moles, grey lizards,

shoot arrows at hissing reptiles

and bake goose-foot pastries.

Hunger drives them after butterflies — 

they’ve collected a whole sack of them.

Today Mama

will be making butterfly borsch.

Enraptured, as if in a dream,

not believing the truth,

the children watch

with big eyes made holy by hunger

as a hare leaps tenderly through the trees.

It might be a vision from the world of light —

but the vision is agile and soon gone —

nothing left but the black tip of an ear.

An arrow sped after it,

but too late — the ample dinner had fled.

The children stand as if under a spell…

‘Look — a butterfly!  Quick!  After it! 

Over there now! Pale blue!’

The woods are dark, a wolf from far away

comes to the spot

where a year before

he had eaten a lamb.

He circled round and round like a top, sniffed everywhere,

but nothing remained —

the ants had worked hard — save one dry hoof.

Embittered, the wolf tightened his lumpy ribs

and made off beyond the trees.

There with his heavy paw he’ll crush

crimson-browed grouse and grey capercaillie

that have gone to sleep beneath the snow —

and he too will get sprinkled with snow.

A vixen, a fiery ball of fluff,

clambered onto a tree stump,

and contemplated her future: 

should she become a dog?

Should she become a servant to humans?

Many traps had been laid —

she could take her pick.

No, it wouldn’t be safe;

they’d eat a red fox

quick as they eat dogs!

And the fox began to wash herself with her downy paws,

spinning her fiery tail into the air

like a sail.

A squirrel grumbled:

“Where are my nuts and acorns?

The people have eaten them!”

Quietly, transparently, evening came.

With a quiet murmur, a pine kissed a poplar.

Tomorrow they may

be chopped down

and broken up for breakfast.

7 October, 1921

             Hunger (The third section of Khlebnikov’s long version of this poem)

Fire-eye,

without its lashes

of downpours and rain,

has been burning our earth, our fields

and whole nations of stalks of grain.

Rippling like dry straw,

fields smoked and ears of grain yellowed,

faded and withered into a dry death.

Scattered, the grain fed mice.

Is the sky ill?  Is the sky a sick person?

It has no moist eyelashes,

no mighty downpours, none

of the weather that makes for fine harvests.

Burning the grass, the fields and our gardens,

the eye of the heat remained cruelly yellow,

always golden, with no brows of clouds.

People sat down submissively to wait

for a miracle — but there are no such things — or death.

This was a pale-blue doom.

This was drought.  Among beloved years —

a stepson.

Everything — grain and rain —

had betrayed the farmer’s labour.

Had not the ploughman’s hands,

sweating as always, scattered

good grains that very spring?

Had not the farmer’s eyes

looked in hope at the sky

all summer long,

in expectation of rain?

The naked eye of the heat,

this eye of golden fire,

was burning with golden rays

the cornfields of the Volga.

Through the ravine in the forest,

raising clouds of dust,

the crowd hurried to the green hills and the three pines.

All in a rush and agitated,

holding sticks in their hands,

long beards like wedges,

they hurried along.

All of them, children and adults, were running.

This was hunger.

It was to find the holy clay,

that can be eaten like bread,

that you don’t die from,

that people were in such a rush.

Clay — you alone remained

when everything let us down!

Clay!  Earth!

Hunger was herding humanity.

Men, women and children,

filling the ravine,

were hurrying to find the holy clay

that is as good as bread.

Clay — the mute saviour

beneath the roots of hundred-year-old pines.

And that was when the mind of scientists,

aspiring towards other worlds,

wanted to construct a dream of life

out of lands subordinated to thought.

                                                                October, 1921

            Love Flight

Will you turn

your twisted plait

to a bow-string for me?

Hold

me to the burnished bow

of your brow —

and I,

with finer feathers,

will outfly

the swiftest storm!

                                                                25 January, 1921

            The air is split

The air is split into black branches,

like old glass.

Pray to Our Lady of Autumn!

The windows of autumn’s chapel,

smashed by a hurtling bullet,

are wrinkling.

A tree was burning,

a bright spill in the golden air.

It bends; it bows down.

Autumn’s flint and steel angrily

struck the sparks of golden days.

A forest at prayer.  All at once

golden smells fell to the ground.

Trees stretch out — rakes

gathering armfuls of the sun’s hay.

Autumn’s tree resonantly evokes

a sketch of Russia’s railroads.

The golden autumn wind

has scattered me everywhere.

                                                7 November, 1921

            Moscow, who are you?

Moscow, who are you?

Enchantress or enchanted?

Forger of freedom

or fettered lady?

What thought furrows your brow

as you plot your world-wide plot?

Are you a shining window

into another age?

O Moscow, are you femme fatale

or fetter-fated,

fated or fêted?

Does scholarship decree

your crucifixion

beneath the razorblades of clever scholars

frozen over an old book

as pupils stand around their desk?

O daughter of other centuries,

powder-keg,

explosion of your fetters. 

                                15 December, 1921

            I, a butterfly

I, a butterfly that has flown

into the room of human life,

must leave the handwriting of my dust

like a prisoner’s signature

over the stern windows,

across fate’s strict panes.

The wallpaper of human life

is grey and sad.

And there is the windows’

transparent ‘No’.

I have worn away my deep-blue morning glow,

my patterns of dots,

my wing’s light-blue storm, first freshness.

The powder’s gone, the wings have faded

and turned transparent and hard.

Jaded, I beat

against the window of mankind.

From the other side knock eternal numbers,

summoning me to the motherland,

calling a number to return to all numbers.

                                                                                1921  ≈

Note: also read the interview with Robert Chandler.>>

The present research draws on empirical evidence in four countries and their capital cities to highlight the links between the threefold transition to democracy, markets, and decentralized government on the spatial transformation of post-socialist cities. The diverse mosaic of urban experiences in Prague, Riga, Belgrade, and Tirana is related to major drivers of change in the economic, social, and institutional environment. These are related to patterns of spatial transformation in three principal domains: (1) spaces of production and consumption, reflecting the economic transition; (2) differentiation in residential spaces, associated with the social transition; and (3) new approaches to planning and service delivery, resulting from the transition in government. 

Central to the arguments in the present article is that transition of this magnitude has created a complex urban world in which the patterns of divergence will become more explicit in the future, producing spatial and temporal differentiation among post-socialist cities. The methodology builds on a number of qualitative and quantitative methods. The research uses a case study approach, content analysis of regulatory plans, policy documents, and secondary sources pertinent to the transformation of urban economies and societies in the cities under review. These methods are complemented by personal interviews with twenty-four planners and policymakers involved in strategic planning and management processes over a period of five years, as well as personal observations of major urban developments in the four capital cities. The field work for this research was begun in 2004 and completed in 2008, incorporating a series of observations and field visits that were instrumental for the understanding of dynamic process of economic, social, and spatial transformation. The case studies are conceptually appropriate as they illustrate diversity in both the exogenous factors (including the most and the least advanced reformers) and the endogenous factors (including different transformation trajectories of planning institutions). The focus on capital cities is deliberate, since they are where the post-socialist transformation is expected to be manifested most explicitly due to their widely recognized role as the administrative, financial, cultural, and economic drivers of national economies. The research does not explore the impact of the global financial crisis on these cities due to a variety of limitations, the most important of which is the lack of systematic data to analyze relatively new phenomena observed since 2009. Nevertheless, some reference to these phenomena is made, where possible, to highlight patterns of diversity. 

Similarly, the researchers acknowledge that the focus on the capital cities of the four countries concerned excludes lower-tier urban centers. The set of constraints and opportunities that face the dominant national center is quite different from that experienced by most other urban centers in the national urban system, regardless of size, location, and hierarchical position. However, second-tier cities may well experience similar trajectories of urban and social change, so the analytical framework advanced in the paper may be widely applicable. By the same token, the emphasis on planning institutions and their ability to effectively manage the spatial transformation justifies the focus on capital cities, where a new generation of strategic and regulatory instruments has been approved in response to development pressure. In the secondary cities, the process has been delayed and/or taken a back seat to competing issues such as unemployment, fiscal deficits, and social stress. 

Framework for the analysis of urban change in post-socialist cities

It is important to situate the post-socialist urban experience in the context of overall institutional transformation on the one hand, and of rapidly changing economic and political systems on the other. This undeniable complexity creates unique challenges for planning and urban policy. The analytical framework of the research draws on approaches in the urban literature that use the country’s urban system as an analytical construct to interpret major trends. It is argued that the urban system serves as the primary channel linking the national economy to the global system of cities.3 Viewing development through the urban lens, the approach explicitly links the changes in the external (national and global) environment, which are much more dramatic and revolutionary, to changes in the internal environment (the urban system and the city itself), by emphasizing the nature and diversity of the ongoing transformation. The transformations are associated with three aspects of the transition process that are particularly important for post-socialist cities: the transition to markets (systemic economic change), to democracy (systemic political change), and to decentralized systems of local democratic government.4 The analytical framework advances the notion that the triple transition is a major driver of urban change. Further, local responses to global pressures (competition for markets, trade) and to policy reforms at the national level (privatization of industry, deregulation of property markets, and social policy reforms) set the framework for spatial changes in three major domains: spaces of production and consumption, residential spaces, and spaces for the provision of essential urban services. Finally, the spatial transformation of post-socialist cities is guided by plans for future development as well as by the ability of planning institutions to lead implementation.5 

In mapping an analytical terrain for this comparative study, the “socialist city” is taken as the primary point of departure. One set of influences represents the outcomes associated with the transition to markets, democracy, and decentralized government. These influences are viewed as important drivers of urban change, leading to converging trends in the transformation of urban economies and societies. Notwithstanding these patterns of convergence, the framework recognizes the diversity in the initial conditions — different levels of economic and social development — due to past socialist policies, as well as differences in the spatial legacy of cities, some of which have developed over 800 years in which the socialist period can be viewed as a brief discontinuity. Such important sources of difference are often ignored in the literature, as if the “socialist city” were a carbon copy of the Soviet ideal, and planning under socialism were identical across all countries. 

The application of this framework maps critical differences in the urban transformation of post-socialist countries during the past twenty years. Some have become well-functioning competitive democracies, while others have struggled to establish political and economic stability.6 Although national differences are powerful determinants of transformation paths, the cities themselves also shape their own trajectories. The framework recognizes the critical links between national policies and the types of responses at the local level, thus capturing the multi-layered nature of spatial transformations. The starting point could be the ideal model of a “socialist” city. That ideal is an important legacy which affects a city’s economy, its social and spatial structure, and the quality of its urban services. To what degree actual cities were “socialist” under state socialism is an important question for debate. Notwithstanding country-specific differences, the salient characteristics of the “socialist” city are distinguishable, and have been extensively discussed in the literature.7 

Table 1 links these characteristics to trajectories of change, in which similar trends in economic, social, and institutional transformation increasingly map to a diverse set of outcomes in post-socialist cities. 

This application of the analytical framework reviews major patterns of change related to the transition to markets, democracy, and decentralized government and their impact on Prague, Riga, Belgrade, and Tirana. The analysis highlights salient features of the transformation stemming from the economic, social, and political transition in the three domains: spaces of production and consumption, residential differentiation, and the provision of services. The evidence from the case studies is summarized in Table 2, with an emphasis on factors of similarity and dissimilarity. 

The economic transition and new spaces of production and consumption

The transition from a centrally planned, industrialized system of mass production to a system of flexible accumulation has been accompanied by a restructuring of the welfare state and a transition to pluralistic, democratic government. National economies in the post-socialist world have become increasingly integrated in a global system of production, distribution, and exchange. The liberalization of trade, the international flow of capital, and the growing influence of transnational corporations have led to fundamental economic restructuring, which is particularly visible in Prague and Riga.8 The internationalization of capital cities has been accompanied by deindustrialization, growth of command and control functions, and changing power relations between the public and the private sector.9 The structural changes in the economies of Prague and Riga were introduced in the early 1990s (through voucher privatization), and economic growth resumed in the mid-1990s. In fact, despite the loss of Soviet markets, Riga has had very strong GDP growth, while Prague has maintained its economic competitiveness in the Czech Republic, contributing 25% of the country’s GDP. In both cities, private sector output tripled, and reached over 60% of GDP by 1995. This dynamic adjustment has been accompanied by rapid growth of the service sector, which accounts for 60% of the GDP in Prague and 70% in Riga.10 Both cities have attracted the lion’s share of foreign investment in economic restructuring and property development due to their more liberal and stable environments. 

In Serbia, by contrast, the economic transition was delayed by a decade. In Belgrade the Milošević regime propped up public enterprises, resisted deregulation, and brought a severe economic crisis and civil wars. During the time of international sanctions in 2000, the city became home to 100,000 refugees from other parts of Yugoslavia and a flourishing grey economy11. In Albania, a much more underdeveloped economic system dependent on a few resource-based industries and agriculture collapsed in the early 1990s, leading to massive migration to cities. Thousands of migrants in search of economic opportunities doubled Tirana’s population within two years.12 Privatization and the opening of previously sheltered sectors to growing competition in the global marketplace have required the urgent adjustment of industries, services, and other economic activities.13 The private sector expanded from 5% of GDP in 1990 to 75% in 2002. The transition to service-oriented economies in Belgrade and Tirana has increased the importance of private small enterprises (with less than 10 employees) in retail, construction, and business services.14 Overall, the economies of the capital cities have managed to sustain a more stable labor market sheltered from high unemployment, with rates half to one third of the national average, with the exception of Tirana, where unemployment has remained high (19% in 2005). The informal economy in Belgrade and Tirana has become well entrenched, accounting for 30% to 50% of the GDP.15 

The transition to market-oriented forms of economic development is reflected in a number of changes in the urban fabric. In Prague, some existing industrial zones have experienced intensification to accommodate the growing number of new private firms, warehouses, and offices.16 In Riga and Belgrade, industrial zones associated with manufacturing have declined, leaving behind brownfield sites. The large state enterprises, a legacy of the socialist past, have gone bankrupt, and the industrial landscape has become dominated by abandoned complexes of industrial and administrative buildings, particularly in Tirana and Belgrade. New production activities, driven by foreign investment, have generated demand for suburban industrial warehouses, often beyond the urban edge, and/or ribbon development close to airports and transit hubs.17 The continued growth of private service industries has made areas with good exposure and transportation access more attractive to private investors. Such processes, although rather moderate in Tirana and Belgrade, have created demand for new industrial spaces (warehouses, logistics, and small-scale flexible production). 

The post-socialist economies of the capital cities have solidified their position as financial and business centers, attracting a large share of investment in banking, retail, and office developments. The most dramatic spatial transformations are manifested in the commercial property markets in Prague and Riga, which have attracted the largest share of institutional foreign investment. New office functions in banking and finance have resulted in dynamic property development in new suburban office parks and business centers in Prague and Riga, and more recently in Tirana and Belgrade.18 By 2010, the supply of office space in Prague (class A and B) reached 1,700,000 m2, and in Riga 518,000 m2. Nearly half of the supply was built after 2004 to accommodate international companies and multinational corporations.19 

The retail sector experienced dynamic growth as well.20 In Tirana and Belgrade, a high level of small-scale retail activity, often located in ground level apartments, garages, and newly-built street retail premises, characterizes the sector. In Prague and Riga, the consolidation of retail investment, often with foreign partners, has been channeled into the construction of new high-end retail spaces in the city center and suburban locations.21 The increased interest in the development of shopping malls in Riga and Prague has created new landscapes of retail, entertainment, restaurants, and hotels, associated with a new urban culture of consumerism and rising purchasing power.22 The shopping malls, often in suburban locations, have provided a new, more sophisticated retail experience compared to the old bazaars, retail strips, and open markets.23 By 2005, Prague and Riga had acquired 600 m2 of shopping center space per 1,000 residents, and Tirana 140 m2.24 

The social transition and growing inequality in residential environments

The legacy of centrally directed urbanization driven by industrial growth during socialism has had powerful consequences for post-socialist cities. Although capital cities weathered the economic transition much better than industrialized company towns, Tirana and Riga were hit badly by the closures of unproductive state enterprises in the early 1990s. Prague, despite a much more moderate economic recession, also experienced growing unemployment and poverty. The socialist system had a more egalitarian income distribution than the new market-based system. It also tolerated lower economic growth to avoid income inequality. Not surprisingly, a new attribute of the economic transition is income polarization, which, measured by the Gini coefficient, has increased rapidly, with important implications for social safety nets and access to housing and urban services.25 Although data indicate that capital cities have incomes 30% to 40% higher than the national average, the proportion of the population living in poverty in 2005 was 8% in Tirana and 15% in Belgrade.26 

The social cost of the transition from planning to markets has been high, particularly in Belgrade and Tirana, where increasing costs of living have been combined with limited support from a less generous welfare state to groups at risk: the long-term unemployed, large or one-parent families, people with little education, and increasing numbers of ethnic minorities. A two-speed urban economy with poorly paid service jobs and a privileged sector of highly paid professionals, coupled with cutbacks in social welfare and reduced spending on social programs, have contributed to the growing social inequalities. In the capital cities, the two-speed economy has underpinned the formation of a two-speed housing market.27 The results are bifurcated, with concentrations of the urban poor in peripheral housing estates and/or informal housing on the one hand, and the spatial segregation of newly formed elites in gated communities on the other.28 Privatization policies increased homeownership dramatically, leading to 98% owner occupation in Tirana and Belgrade in the early 1990s, while Riga and Prague reached levels of 85% fifteen years later. All of these cities have a high proportion of multifamily housing built during socialism: about half of all housing in Riga and Tirana, 30% in Belgrade, and 20% in Prague.29 This highly subsidized housing provision was the flagship of socialist housing policies, and is difficult to manage without state subsidies to address growing needs for renovation and energy efficiency improvements. Prague, and to a limited extent Riga, have launched some programs to reverse the spiral of urban decline, but progress has been limited. 

While these trends define major changes in the residential environment, the overall transformation of housing areas in the capital cities, both inner city and suburban, is less uniform. Typically, new housing construction has gentrified attractive inner city neighborhoods or has transformed the urban fringe with single-family developments.30 Just like new office and retail development, new housing has added rings to the existing compact urban structure. A number of studies document increasing housebuilding in Prague and Riga since 1998 and a pattern of extensive growth driven by higher mobility and preferences for single-family living.31 Newfound prosperity in these cities and a more consolidated property development industry responsive to housing demand has delivered a number of planned communities for the elite market, ranging from medium to high-density developments. 

By contrast, most of the new housebuilding in Belgrade and Tirana has resulted in organic, unplanned growth in periurban areas, where investment is made without any planning, permits, cadastre registration, or mortgage financing. This phenomenon has reshaped the urban landscape of the two cities in a profound way, creating complex challenges for the delivery of infrastructure and government in these communities. Some estimates indicate that about a third of the residents in Tirana and nearly 20% of the residents in Belgrade live in informal housing.32 Informal developments have become a socially acceptable response to an urban crisis in the provision of affordable housing, where illegal connections to existing infrastructure ensure much-needed electricity and water. Some of these are squatter settlements on public land or illegal subdivisions outside municipal boundaries.33 In Belgrade, research documents a more nuanced pattern of landownership and investment by high and low-income groups alike. In Tirana and Belgrade, remittances are vital for the upgrading of such settlements. The quality of housing is generally better in Belgrade, and residents are relatively effective in resisting attempts to relocate them. Often they have managed to secure connections to city services and have organized their own community-run transportation and waste management. Kaluđerica, on the outskirts of Belgrade, is a self-made city of 50,000 residents recently incorporated in the new master plan. Legalization, however, has been delayed by the lack of adequate legal framework and operational implementation procedures. 

The transition in government and the provision of services

The hallmark of the political transition has been the move to democracy and multiparty elections. Post-socialist capitals have created a variety of political structures (elected local councils) and multi-tier municipal administrations with various degrees of autonomy. In the absence of national urban policies, and under frequently changing political regimes, local governments have operated in an environment that is less predictable and fiscally much more conservative than in socialist times. As part of the process of decentralization and institutional change, local governments have become important agents in economic development, urban planning, and city management.34 They have retained statutory responsibility for providing and maintaining technical infrastructure and urban social services. In the four capital cities under review, municipalities have acquired ownership of water and sewerage companies, district heating systems, and public housing. At the same time, running public transit, schools, hospitals, social care homes, and essential infrastructure with fewer central subsidies has raised the expenditures of local governments. 

Legislation on fiscal decentralization and revenue sharing in Albania and Serbia was introduced in the mid-2000s, allowing municipalities to borrow on capital markets, and improving the local tax base somewhat through business and property taxes. Fiscally constrained local governments in Tirana and Belgrade have been able to invest less than 20% of their budgets, and have had a higher dependency on intergovernmental transfers.35 As a result, many services have deteriorated, with long-term implications for urban residents. In Prague and Riga, a more stable fiscal policy and a sustainable local tax base has ensured investment of over 40% of municipal budgets in city improvements, although the need for resources has been higher.36 Since 2004, both of these cities have benefited from regional programs and EU funds for major infrastructure projects in transport, water, communications, and environmental protection. In the past few years, Belgrade and Tirana, attempting to address the accumulated backlog, have made much-needed investments and upgrades in urban infrastructure and transport. Riga and Tirana have launched international competitions for the redesign of the city center, and Belgrade has channeled strategic investors in the rebuilding of New Belgrade. 

Under decentralized government, urban planning has become a critical regulatory instrument guiding the spatial transformation of post-socialist cities. In the aftermath of the economic and political crisis of socialism, followed by the erosion of the welfare state, planning institutions have struggled to redefine their mandate and to establish their legitimacy. Studies have found that the new, market-oriented local governments have adopted “entrepreneurial” attitudes and a laissez-faire approach to planning. Local responses to rapid changes in demand for new offices, retail space, and housing have defined a new repertoire of planning instruments. Planning legislation, norms, and institutions have had to adjust to new power relations in the institutional mosaic of actors reshaping post-socialist cities.37 With the new market orientation, urban development has ridden a wave of investment in those land uses that offer the highest returns, and selective redevelopment by the private sector.38 

In their search for new planning paradigms and more flexible approaches, Prague and Riga have embraced strategic planning as a way to involve residents, the business community, and various stakeholders in defining a vision for the future. In Tirana and Belgrade, the process has been delayed and planning has become irrelevant in the rapidly expanding “wild cities” of periurban areas. Planners have experimented in the past few years with incremental changes, in a spirit of “muddling through” and an effort to incorporate informal development.39 The institutional and regulatory vacuum in the last fifteen years has allowed numerous ad hoc changes to detailed urban plans from socialist times to accommodate developer interests and politically driven compromises. Finally, a fairly large part of market development has taken place with no planning intervention, but with the expectation of being legalized at a later stage.40 

Winds of change: differences and similarities

The complex interplay of different forces associated with the triple transition to markets, democracy, and decentralized government in post-socialist societies has been illustrated in four national trajectories: Latvian, Czech, Serbian, and Albanian. The countries had significant differences at the start of the transition process, but they have also implemented different economic, political, and governmental reforms. The focus on Prague, Riga, Belgrade, and Tirana provides a more nuanced interpretation of the post-socialist transition, avoiding the focus on Central Europe that dominates the scholarly literature, and examining cities whose socialist legacy was more aligned with the Soviet norms alongside others shaped by more liberal socialist systems. 

The winds of change in the economic, social, and institutional domains have affected the spatial transformation of the capital cities and the adjustment of their economies, societies, and spatial structures in a manner that implies some convergence. The empirical evidence from Riga, Prague, Belgrade, and Tirana points to common trends, but also to substantial differences that will continue to shape divergent spatial trajectories in the future. At the level of planning and implementation, convergence seems less of a reality. Central to the arguments in the article is that transition of this magnitude has created a complex urban world in which the patterns of divergence will become more explicit in the future, producing spatial and temporal differentiation among post-socialist cities. 

The literature has noted that socialist era experiences, tenure forms, demographics, and social composition affect the outcomes of general or nationally unique policy decisions. The countries covered here have experienced population decline (as a result of emigration), growth, and/or stability, all in the context of rapid transition to markets and democracy. Clearly, that kind of experience is different from the contextual factors that are relevant to a more stable transformation in Western Europe. Patterns of diversity and change also matter at the local level and manifest themselves in selective redevelopment and decline at the neighborhood level. It is not only the urban economy that is two-speed, but also the fates of individual cities relative to others, and change within housing estates and neighborhoods. Thus, the occurrence of gated communities, or new suburban divisions, differs quite markedly across the four cities studied, as does the occurrence of informal housing developments. The effects of retrenched welfare programs also differ substantially, Tirana possibly being the extreme case where many of the socialist privileges were abruptly eliminated, while in Serbia war-related conflicts and displacement became the major source of social stress. 

Notwithstanding these differences, given the importance of cities, countries in the region need a strategic focus on urban policies to promote more efficient and effective change management. National governments need to recognize that the urban agenda is central for the economic competitiveness of post-socialist economies and the governance of these highly urbanized societies. The framework advanced in this article allows a more integrated approach to urban governance that brings together perspectives on the economy, society, institutions, and space in an interdisciplinary way. The approach allows different policy choices that integrate the urban perspectives in a dialogue on national and local development policies. This provides an opportunity to have an impact on pressing urban issues with high stakes for national poverty reduction, equitable growth, and environmental improvement, ensuring the complementarity of sectoral reforms. ≈ 

The leader of the new Bolshevik state, Vladimir Lenin, proclaimed that culture should serve political needs, which meant in effect that all culture was now viewed as propaganda. In his memoirs, the first Minister of Education in Bolshevik Russia, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wrote that Lenin had told him in 1918, “It is necessary to advance art as the means of agitation.”

With the establishment of the concept of a dictatorship of the proletariat, the need for new proletarian art and culture became essential, and street festivals and performances became cornerstones of the new mythology of the new Russia. The new myths and images were aimed at redefining life, reinventing social relations, and rejuvenating cults and traditions.

The People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment (Narkompros) invited artists to leave their studios and to participate in decorating streets, squares, and public buildings for the two annual celebrations that served as landmarks in the construction of a Soviet identity: the anniversary of the October Revolution, and May Day.

These festivals were first celebrated at a time when the whole country, especially Petrograd, was threatened by internal counterrevolution and external intervention. In March 1918, the threat of an occupation of Petrograd by the German forces compelled the Bolshevik government to transfer the party headquarters, and the Russian capital, to Moscow.

In the middle of this difficult political situation, which was complicated even further by famine, the Soviet government announced a May Day celebration throughout the country.

In Russia, the first May Day demonstration took place in 1897. The demonstrations of 1901 to 1903 united thousands of workers, calling for political struggle. Under the tsars, festivals were a prerogative of the church and the government. Demonstrations were illegal, and May Day processions were often dispersed and outlawed. The only legal processions were funerals, which consequently served as pretexts for political manifestation.

May Day was legalized and made an official festival by the Provisional Government after the February Revolution of 1917. Unlike Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Kerensky and the Provisional Government did not pay much attention to art policy or mass spectacles. The Arts Commission (Komissiia po delam iskusstva) was established on March 4, 1917. It included the renowned author Maxim Gorki and famous World of Art artists Alexandre Benois, Nikolai Roerich, and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky. They focused on the pressing need to save palaces and works of art from the threats of war and revolution.

At the same time, other artists in Petrograd — representing 182 artistic movements, from futurists to traditional realists  — formed the All-Arts Union (Soiuz deiatelei vsekh iskusstv). The Provisional Government called on the union to help create a special mass festival on May Day.

In Petrograd, Lev Rudnev,1 the architect of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, was in charge of the city decorations. On May 18, 1917, Rudnev also won the first prize in the competition for the Monument to the Victims of the Revolution at the Field of Mars. His monument, called Ready-made Stones, looked like a stepped pyramid, and was made of granite stones left over from the rebuilding of the Neva embankment.

Thousands of people turned out for the 1917 May Day parade. They carried allegorical banners and posters, which became the main elements of the decorations in Petrograd. These banners marked the birth of a popular image, repeated many times in posters and city decorations: the figure of a strong worker in front of an anvil with a plowing peasant and the rising sun in the background. Later, an image of a worker in a Russian shirt, leather apron, and boots became one of the most popular symbols used by the Bolsheviks. He was usually depicted with a moustache (since a beard was an attribute of the Orthodox peasants), holding a hammer poised to strike an anvil. These banners introduced a new allegorical language.

In his book Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920, James von Geldern writes,

Festivals test a symbol more rigorously than other environments do. An emblem sewn on a shirt or decorating a pamphlet lies in a congenial context that supports and complements its message. Symbols displayed in a public festival must compete for attention, and they must drive home their message through a stew of competing symbols and hostile interpretations. The cultural heritage was particularly formidable during festivals, when it was embodied by the city itself. The language and medium of a festival is the city, its people, streets, and buildings.2

Initially, the major source of inspiration for allegorical figures was the neoclassical tradition transmitted by the French Revolution. While the Bolsheviks still struggled with the ideas of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune due to their bourgeois nature, Kerensky’s government adopted them wholeheartedly. They used the Marseillaise as their anthem, and in August 1917 they even proposed a “grandiose carnival-spectacle honoring the epoch of the French Revolution to be organized in the Summer Garden to aid Russian prisoners of war. . . . A prop city will be built depicting the Paris of that time. Actors will portray the artistic and theatrical bohemia of the late eighteenth century.”3 The Provisional Government proposed that Evreinov direct it and Yury Annenkov make all the stage designs. Although this rather mad idea never materialized, Evreinov and Annenkov worked together on the most imposing mass spectacles of the 1920s.4

On May Day 1917, the procession in Petrograd included reenactments of the February Revolution, the 1905 uprising, the tsar’s family, and a woman portraying Freedom. She stood on Nevsky Prospect in front of the State Duma building, dressed in a Classical tunic and holding a broken chain in her hands. A banner was created by professional artists for the workers of the famous Putilov Factory, and featured a woman in a white tunic standing on a globe holding a palm branch — a Christian symbol of triumph, victory, and sacrifice — in one hand, and a torch in the other. The slogan proclaimed, “Long live the International!”

Religious symbols were widely used, including angels and St. George. As Victoria Bonnell observed, “the most central image, which provided a ‘cultural frame’ for organizing political narratives under the old regime, was that of St. George”.5

The tsarist government had repeatedly employed the image of St. George for political propaganda during the First World War. For May Day, 1917, workers from the Petrograd tannery produced a banner with the image of St. George killing the dragon. The dragon was also depicted on a banner painted by an amateur artist, carried by the piping workshop of the Izhorskii factory. Here a young woman with broken chains reached toward the sun, while the dead dragon was painted with a crown and scepter, symbolizing the tsar’s defeated autocracy. The slogan on the banner proclaimed, “Long live the democratic revolution and the 8-hour workday!”

Although Russian workers and peasants could relate to religious images, they were less likely to be able to “read” neoclassical images. The important literary critic and historian Viacheslav Polonski wrote in the 1920s that the prevalence of allegories and symbols was a consequence of the “bourgeois consciousness of those artists who came from the bourgeois class, bringing with them, together with technical skills, an alien approach to the interpretation of agitational lithography”.6

In 1917—1919, most festival decorations and banners were still painted by professional artists. Thus a famous soviet artist, Alexander Samokhvalov, who in 1917 was a student at the Academy of Arts in Petrograd, wrote about May Day,

The Revolution demanded slogans, symbols and posters. They were necessary for those who felt that the Socialist Revolution was inevitable. Workers from factories would bring texts for the slogans and red fabric to us at the Academy. We would write their slogans, trying to illustrate them with industrial symbols: anvils, hammers, sickles and so on.7

But could professional artists or academic students create a new proletarian art that was comprehensible to the masses? In his article “Art and the Street”, the leader of the World of Art movement, Alexander Benois, remarked, “When high art stayed away from the street, the street still had a vibrant artistic life. But now high art has come out onto the street — and everything has become rather confusing.”8

Apart from the contradiction between the visual language of workers and that of the intelligentsia, the desire of festival planners to celebrate the Revolution in a harmonious style was often frustrated by the cities themselves, particularly by Petrograd, the former imperial capital. Petrograd’s ceremonial center was dominated by the classicism of the tsar’s palaces. For the celebrations of the First of May, 1917, all the buildings on the Palace Square, including the Winter Palace, were decorated for the first time with white drapes with red edgings and revolutionary slogans. As one of the journalists present, Mikhail Levidov, remarked in his article “On the Day of the Red Festival”, “These decorations were the only bright spots on the dull yellow background.”9

The idea of decorating the Classical facades of the old palaces was developed even further after the October Revolution of 1917. Under the Bolsheviks, avant-garde artists assumed the right to develop art for the newly formed communist state, and the commission to decorate Petrograd for May Day 1918, was awarded to futurists.10 It was the first big state commission after the October Revolution, and it was entrusted to the “leftist artists” who gathered around the Visual Arts Department of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (IZO Narkompros): Natan Altman, Ivan Puni, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Konstantin Boguslavskii, Vladimir Lebedev, and others.

As a statement of their new art, the futurists covered the facades of most of the historic buildings in the center of Petrograd with bright cubist posters featuring futurist slogans. These unique city decorations and their reception by the hungry, impoverished townspeople, recorded in the press of 1918, became the true expression of the first steps towards new art in Bolshevik Russia.

One of the leading artists of the World of Art movement, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, wrote,

Well, you must admit we have witnessed the birth of a new era: on the First of May we artists finally took our revolutionary banners out onto the streets, and just look how delightfully the creations of new art adorned the city. At last, we have declared war on the despotism of architectural lines, which have imprisoned the artist’s free eye long enough!11

However, most reactions to these ultra-modern city decorations were not so positive. The newspaper Vechernie Ogni [Evening lights] presented a rather sarcastic description of the May Day decorations of Petrograd:

On the façade of the hotel Astoria is a poster depicting a knight on a green horse, striking someone’s light brown leg with a spear. The slogan says, “Let Us Defend Petrograd” [Zashchitim Petrograd]. / On the Mariinsky Palace there are three posters: (1) a man and a woman are loading guns; between them are two lonely buds; the inscription reads “Build the Red Army” [Stroite Krasnuiu Armiiu]. (2) Cubes, triangles and scrolls of all the colors of the rainbow alternately scattered around. The letters “Fial …” and “ki” are mixed among the cubes [fialki is Russian for violets]. Underneath is written, for those who did not understand, “flowers”. (3) The same cubes, triangles and scrolls with the words “First of May” [Pervoe Maia]. / The General Staff Building was adorned with several mysterious pictures. . . . Participants in the demonstrations especially enjoyed seeing on one of the posters a blacksmith with one right hand and four left hands; his right eye was flying somewhere in the clouds. / By the Alexander Column, facing Konnogvardeiski Boulevard, was a large painted panel showing dancing peasants — a woman and two men — one in a red and other in a green shirt; it is inscribed “First of May” [Pervoe Maia]. / On the façade of the Winter Palace is a canvas with two figures shaking hands in the middle of a green field; between them is a tree without any leaves but with two red cones; a sign says, “Power to the Soviets” [Vlast’ Sovetam].12

The Soviet Festivals were seen by the Bolsheviks as the most effective tool in agitation and in the education of the proletariat. Essential funds and manpower were diverted to them in the midst of famine and economic disaster. Often on the day of the festival restaurants and cafes offered cheap meals to the starving population. The new state had to explain its newly invented founding myth to the populace: during the challenging time of economic disaster and civil war, they allocated special funds to the festivals, but struggled to develop a visual language understandable to the proletariat.

The leading art critic of twentieth-century Russia, Nikolay Punin, proclaimed in the futurist newspaper Iskusstvo Kommuny [Art of the Commune],

To blow up the old artistic forms, demolish them, wipe them off the face of the earth: that’s the dream of the new artist, the proletarian artist, the new man. . . . If you can’t destroy, build stage props, pretend to demolish — but do not decorate. Do not decorate, since nobody needs these decorations. Not just me, but everyone who has eyes and some common sense was sorry to see such a huge amount of fabric spoiled by often very low quality posters; in our time when we all lack trousers or skirts, it is the same as hanging bread on the streets just for fun. . . . We did not need these painted cloths, wet, faded and torn; life was not merry in those days.13

For the first time in Russia, new futurist art claimed to be the artistic vanguard, but proved unable to communicate with the proletariat — now the most important class, after the Bolshevik revolution — and soon had to surrender to more self-explanatory realism. As early as 1919, the May Day decorations were fairly self-explanatory: “Everything was clear and easy to understand, there were no mysterious paintings on pieces of fabric on the streets, no caricatures.”14

But futurist or not, the people’s impressions of the festive decorations and spectacles were often so strong that the recollections of even those who witnessed the historical events were overridden by the dramatized performances. Memory can be very selective, and tends to remember joyful and cheerful occasions. The Bolsheviks banked on this, and probably won. ≈

Fabulae

Published in 1977, as Grass’s gift to himself on his 50th birthday, The Flounder has been found difficult to read, and even a misadventure. The title comes from the fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife” (Von dem Fischer un syner Fru) collected by the brothers Grimm.4 The tale recounts the story of a man who catches a fish that asks to be returned to the sea. If he is returned to the sea, the fish promises, he will grant any wish. When the man tells his wife what has happened, she scolds him in disbelief for losing a good fish. To her astonishment, the woman discovers that the fish indeed is magic (“ik bün ’n verwünschten Prins”) and grants wishes. She asks for more and more (cottage, castle, papacy, and kingdom) but finally when she asks for the sun and moon, she loses everything she has gained and is returned to her hovel in a place named Pisspot. In Grass’s version, the Flounder is caught by three young women who represent the women’s liberation movement.5 Instead of returning the fish to the sea, they place the fish on trial for subverting a matriarchal order of culture and civilization.

There was once a Flounder. He was just like the one in the fairy tale. When one day some women who had caught him hauled him before a tribunal, he resolved not to say a word, but only to lie flat, mute, much-wrinkled, and old as the hills in his zinc tub. But after a while his thunderous silence bored him, and he began to play with his pectoral fins. And when Sieglinde Huntscha, the prosecutor, came straight to the point and asked him whether he had deliberately circulated the Low German fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife” as a means of minimizing the importance of the advisory activity that he had demonstrably been carrying on since the Neolithic era, by maliciously and tendentiously distorting the truth at the expense of the fisherman’s wife Ilsebill, his crooked mouth couldn’t help opening and pouring out speech.

The novel evolves as an extensive report of testimony given at the trial, which is held in a movie theater. It is a show-trial, or a grand jury hearing in which the reader is invited to judge whether there is sufficient evidence for an indictment. Since the Flounder is on trial for transforming history itself, historic persons are called to the movie theater courtroom to testify. With great irony, the reader becomes a witness to a trial that at once probes fable, historical evidence, and the ephemeral nature of all narrative.

Examining Baltic Sea histories

The witnesses gathered at the movie theater trial turn the Baltic into a Schauplatz to re-imagine history itself. Herder reminds us that the Baltic shoreline is an intellectual network that permitted work on the relation between languages and history. His allusion to the Baltic as a Zwischenlandschaft describes the space that he himself inhabited and that Grass also occupies.6 As testimonies are received, we move through layers of northern history. The prehistoric period allows Grass to describe the herding of reindeer and hunting and gathering. It also permits him to describe the matriarchal structure that shaped religious practice through the integration of food and sexual reproduction; the subsequent contact between peoples brought about the comparison and development of weaponry. The novel recounts further the incursion of the Teutonic Knights, the Hanseatic League, the Polish wars, the Reformation, the appearances of the Swedes, the continuous disruption of the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Franco-Prussian Wars. Swedes appear again and again, as if Danzig were the muddy backyard of Sweden. The history, preparation, and consumption of food, and the consequences of its consumption, are recounted in detail. The most attended sessions of the trial are the ones in which the Flounder includes recipes in his testimony. A consideration of the genres of German literature is brought together with recipes for cooking flounder.

As the trial proceeds, the Flounder describes the Weltgeist that emerges from the continuous interplay of story-telling that ultimately makes up history. But the stories are not those of lost manuscripts or histories in academic form. They are everyday narratives that have never seen the light of day. Grass follows narratives as they hatch and lead to a proliferation of other narratives. These fabulae continue to reproduce and are like mushrooms that must be found, identified, and cooked. Rather than fixing attention on stories that might be associated with grand myths or master narratives, Grass asks what we might do with the small myths that we live with daily. We are left with the multiplication of stories used to prevaricate, reveal, and conceal. The Weltgeist of the Flounder is not attired in the guise of Hegel’s Weltgeist, but in that of a joker or trickster who always has another recipe up his sleeve. This is a phenomenology, not of the spirit, but of the kitchen.

Self-interrogation in suspense

Grass’s own personal stories interrupt the veneer of historical narrative in such kitchen phenomenology. Overwhelmed by the exhausting trial, the Flounder hides in the mud at the bottom of the large glass tank that has replaced the zinc bathtub and refuses to speak. The narrator too, obligated by a scheduled promotional trip to India, interrupts the trial to give a graphic documentary account of his own reactions to starvation in the subcontinent. India offers an ironic respite in the middle of the trial and constructs a space from which we may look back at the Baltic. But the trip to India is so debilitating that Grass must cut it short because of diarrhea and outright fatigue. (Grass deliberately documents his own confession of being utterly overwhelmed by India.) The episode allows Grass to bring into the open his own impotence as world-renowned writer in the face of starvation in the world. It also shows how poverty and starvation in India may be used to escape the stench under our own noses. Here, in a reversal of a missionary morality, the Baltic becomes India. But as readers searching for incriminating evidence in the Flounder’s trial, the disruption of the India narrative also makes us ask whether something else might be at stake as well. Although the trial portrayed in Danzig is interrupted, we as members of the grand jury may wonder whether the trip also hints at another confession.

Returning to the Danzig trial, we inevitably ask whether there is more to the shadow play of interpretation that both reveals and conceals. In 1977, the crime investigation leads to suspicion regarding the meta-histories used to order and silence the patchwork of stories that make up history. But in the end, incriminating evidence is not found in a single meta-narrative: rather, history itself appears as a testimony of crimes constituted by the ways in which histories are written and rewritten. As fable, history, documentary, personal biography, poetry, and recipes are set before us, we wonder along with the narrator what crime we are really being asked to investigate and how we ourselves may be complicit in the evidence brought forth. In interrogating the Flounder, we interrogate ourselves and the authorities invoked to give credence to one story over another. In an interview in 2006, after the revelation of his affiliation with the Waffen-SS, Grass links self-interrogation and indirect forms of confession with the process of literary writing:

Es ist ja eine Binsenwahrheit, daß unsere Erinnerungen, unsere Selbstbilder trügerisch sein können und es oft auch sind. Wir beschönigen, dramatisieren, lassen Erlebnisse zur Anekdote zusammenschnurren. Und all das, also auch das Fragwürdige, das alle literarischen Erinnerungen aufweisen, wollte ich schon in der Form durchscheinen und anklingen lassen. Deshalb die Zwiebel. Beim Enthäuten der Zwiebel, also beim Schreiben, wird Haut für Haut, Satz um Satz etwas deutlich und ablesbar, da wird Verschollenes wieder lebendig.7

Reading The Flounder with Beim Häuten der Zwiebel in mind, one might argue that Grass, by lending his voice to the Flounder, reveals himself repeatedly, only to hide in the mud and wait to be uncovered again. In this way his novels become a hermeneutics of confession in suspense.8 But the forensic hermeneutics set in play by Grass do not end with Grass, but nag the reader to ask again and again what crime has been committed and whether something more has been concealed. Through the repeated interrogation of established histories, indirectly including Grass’s own, the novel works as a continuous appeal to confession in which solving the “crimes” of history results only in further stories and their interpretations. The alibis used in a detective novel or in a military trial may seem to disappear when a common plot line comes to light, but such a closure may also unravel. For Grass, the knitting and unraveling of stories shape the long wake of his narrative journey through the Baltic with the Flounder. Rather than the epic grandeur of an Odysseus, Grass builds a piratical anti-epic that incites us to listen to fish tales from the Baltic.

The Baltic space

Grass’s Flounder contributes to our work of locating, dislocating, and relocating literature in the Baltic Sea region by challenging us to give attention to the lost or hidden stories that are ignored or played off against each other in the official versions of history that would fix our position in space. While Grass counters the seduction of the big story — universal history — he also reveals himself by getting caught in the contradiction of his own storytelling. Well beyond its own narrative terrain and Grass’s confessional mode, the novel works as a tool kit for unraveling Baltic Sea landscapes. Just as Grass himself intrudes in the story of the Flounder through his documentary confession of a trip to India, he invites us to play through our own histories. His efforts to give speech to the organic — to mushrooms, trees, blood, the smell of soup and the stink of sewage — often appear as an antidote to our susceptibility to be duped by abstraction or allegory. For the study of literature from the Baltic Sea region, the challenge of small, local stories is enormous. It is also important. For this truly is a “Zwischenlandschaft”, covered by the tracks of armies and the ways by which ordinary people have sought to save themselves, reveal themselves, and hide themselves by telling stories. ≈