UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines literary explorations of collectivization by three Soviet writers (Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Sholokhov and Fedor Panferov) through an ecocritical lens. Russian and Soviet literature forms a conspicuous lacuna in ecocritical scholarship; the Soviet collectivization novel is equally a lacuna in accounts of the history of Russian and Soviet environmental thinking. Existing scholarship on Socialist Realism tends to consider the novels set on collective farms as largely interchangeable parts of a coherent canon of formulaic production novels (proizvodsvennye romany), and does not differentiate between Soviet novels according to the setting (city, village, new settlement) or the type of industry (heavy, extractive, agricultural) they depict. This dissertation considers collectivization novels as a distinct type within the larger canon of Socialist Realist novels; it asks what the tendency to collapse factory and agricultural novels may have concealed about Socialist Realism and Stalinist culture, particularly regarding the relationship between man and non-human nature. This dissertation explores how Soviet writers in the countryside attempt to reconcile Soviet triumphalism and its central trope – the “struggle with nature” – with agricultural labor and rural life. On the collective farm, the natural environment presents an impediment to socialist progress, a source of wealth to be extracted, a site of redemption for the peasantry that has historically been defined by its ties to the land, and, ultimately, a site of inquiry into the tension between materiality and utopia. This dissertation seeks to offer new interpretations of Soviet novels through ecocritical analysis, and to explore how Soviet literature might expand and enrich ecocritical approaches.This dissertation should be of interest to scholars of Russian literature, Socialist Realism, ecocriticism, Soviet cultural history, and environmental history.