TRADITIONAL CULTURE AND REVOLUTIONARY SOCIETY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOVIET FOLKLORISTICS IN RUSSIA, 1918-1938 (POLICY, MODERNIZATION, CHANGE, MARXISM)

At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, folkloristics (the study of peasant culture) was an active field in Russia. Russian folkloristics was noted internationally for its pioneering studies of individual performers and its access to a still vital peasant culture. With the Revolution, peasant life became a central target for policies of social, cultural, and political development. Pressure from radical proletarian circles challenged the validity of peasant culture studies, while the new government struggled to retain the support of this vast rural majority. Folklorists became public advocates for the recognition and promotion of rural art, balancing their conventional interests in traditional art with the demand for attention to new areas of study reflecting the processes of urbanization and social change. This essay describes the process of adjustment of this area of intellectual inquiry to the conditions of Soviet life. The focus is upon the changes in the professional field of folklore studies, examining the application of established concepts and methods of folklore research to new subjects of urban life and contemporary politics. Folklorists in the 1920s developed a sociology of folklore, an analysis of popular culture in relationship to occupation, region, and social class. This sociology was based upon performer study, historical study of national epic tradition, and extensive field research, and it was a response to the challenges of Marxism and political radicalism. The political pressures of the 1930s pushed such sociological study aside, in favor of a concept of popular culture as the shared heritage of all Soviet people, and as a resource for the active construction of socialist art. The new concept required intervention and conscious guidance of artistic culture, in keeping with the new tenets of Socialist Realism. As a result, folkloristics became a form of contemporary cultural activism, rather than a field of historical or ethnographic study