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Anna Feldman Leibovich. The Russian Concept of Work: Suffering, Drama a n d Tradition in Pre- a n d Post-Revolutionary Russia. Westport, CT: P r a e g e r Publishers, 1995. xv, 166 pp. $49.95. Is there a Russian c o n c e p t of work? Recently a frustrated "new Russian" who was try- ing to set up a b u s i n e s s empioying Russians in the petroleum industry declared to me: "Russians are a non-working people!" This businessman, like so many entrepren-eurs in Russia today, eventually resorted to hiring foreigners to get the job done. Yet this busi- n e s s m a n himself is a Russian, so there must at least be a "new" Russian concept of work; that is, there must exist what Anna Feldman Leibovich would term a "Western" concept of work or a "work ethic." S u c h a concept, however, is quite different from the traditional Russian concept, which is the subject of Leibovich's valuable new book. According to Leibovich, R u s s i a n s in the newly-industrialized and soon thereafter newly-Sovietized Russia (roughly 1890-1930) perceived work a s an inescapable evil. The way to deal with this evil was to accept it with resignation and suffering, or to glorify it a s an a v e n u e to heroic self-sacrifice. There was something very Christian about this attitude, according to Leibovich, e v e n when the context b e c a m e Soviet-atheist: t h e "religious image of the p a s s i o n of Christ and its underlying c o n c e p t i o n s - s u f f e r i n g , self-sacrifice, and salvation - h a v e � onstituted the paradigm of the Russian meanings of work" (p. 13). Leibovich s u p p o r t s h e r thesis with readings of a broad range of cultural objects. For example, Lev Tolstbi's late diaries and e s s a y s glorify the Christ who welcomed suffering and death on the cross, they elevate altruistic d e e d over mere labor. Theologian Sergei Bulgakov aiso c h a m p i o n e d ascetic notions of labor, but philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev fa- vored p e r s o n a l freedom a n d responsibility. Literary artists like Ivan Bunin a n d Anton Chekhov viewed work a s "an inevitable b o n d a g e and a curse" (p. 52). Leonid Andreev and Maksim Gor'kii, on the other hand, strove to depict a heroic, self-sacrificial kind of la- bor which would benefit humankind. Political leaders like Vladimir Lenin and losif Stalin benefited from the willingness of Russians to suffer heroically and sacrifice themselves on the altar of a future-oriented c a u s e , but they could never induce Russian workers to achieve "American efficiency" (Stalin), in part b e c a u s e it was too ordinary, mercantile, self- interested, rational. Fictional representations of work in the early Soviet period continued to depict labor a s a heroic self-sacrifice in the face of huge obstacles, for example Fedor Gladkov's C e m e n t and Valentin Kataev's Time, For-ward!. Leibovich terms the characters in t h e s e works "new Christians." It would be more accurate, however, to term them the new masochists of the Soviet atheist state. The "Christian" self-sacrifice of Gleb Chumalov, for example, is just t h e s a m e old Russian masochism c h a n n e l e d in a new direction. If Boris Pil'niak (in Mahogany) established a "continuity betwéen the Communists and their historié progenitors, the holy fools" (p. 129), it is b e c a u s e of the inhérent psychological similarity between them, i.e., their common Russian denominator of moral masochism. To invoke the name of J e s u s Christ to explain what is shared by certain pre-Soviet and Soviet writers is only to mention t h e paradigmatic masochist of Western Civilization. Neverthe- less, it is important to discern this a s p e c t of the continuity between old Russia and Soviet Russia, and Leibovich h a s performed a real service for historians of Russian culture. Lei- bovich's a r g u m e n t s are not always consistent or convincing, but s h e h a s turned over the right rock, a s it were, and found under it s o m e interesting if not always pleasant manifesta- tions of moral m a s o c h i s m which to this day make many Russians résistant to the West- ern work ethic. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere University of California, Davis
Canadian-American Slavic Studies – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1998
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