Studia Litterarum (Sep 2024)
Estate-Sanatorium and Garden City: “Happy Spaces” in the Novel How the Steel Was Tempered by N.A. Ostrovsky
Abstract
The article examines modifications of the “estate topos” in the novel by N.A. Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934), which is a landmark for the socialist realist canon.. In the first part of the work, the estate is a “heavenly” topos, a place separated from the unprepossessing working outskirts, a “shelter for the persecuted,” a secluded “happy space,” according to G. Bachelard’s definition. At the same time, the estate and the surrounding wild nature — lake and forest — are the birthplace of the socialist dream of a future happy society. The second part of the novel reveals the transformation of the “estate topos” in the literature of the USSR: “happy spaces” for the collective life of the new society are organized in the former owner’s estates. Ostrovsky’s novel demonstrates features of “crypto-estate mythology” characteristic of the estate topics of the Soviet era. The research shows a continuity of the “happy space” of the former owner’s estate with the phenomenon of the “collective paradise” of the Soviet sanatorium. In Russian and foreign literature of the 20th century, it becomes the place of initiation of heroes as writers (there is a parallel with the sanatorium utopia in T. Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, 1924). However, in the socialist realist novel, the sanatorium is perceived not as a solitary locus of subjective self-determination but as part of a larger world of united fighters for a bright future for humanity. Blind Pavel is introduced into the connection of spaces, a kind of “heterotopia,” by the radio receiver given to him, which returns the hero to the world as a large construction site, a “world plant.”
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