HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

Reviews 211attribution, this conjecture would seem to belong to Hnatenko alone.Given these examples (and many more could be cited), I am obliged to state thatHnatenko has seriously misled the reader by presenting without proper credit thethoughts and ideas of other scholars in an identical rendering or close paraphrase oftheir very own idiom. That fact casts an unfortunate shadow on the catalog and,indirectly, on the good work of the Ukrainian Museum.Michael S. FlierHarvard UniversityFOLKLORE FOR STALIN: RUSSIAN FOLKLORE ANDPSEUDOFOLKLORE OF THE STALIN ERA. By Frank J. Miller.Foreword by William E. Harkins. Armonk, New York and London:M. E. Sharpe, 1990. xiv, 192 pp. $39.95.Picture Lenin and Stalin fighting off their enemies with magic swords or Red Armysoldiers flying on magic carpets. These are among the images from Soviet pseudofolkloredescribed by Frank J. Miller in his Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folkloreand Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era. The cult of specifically Russian folklore was,William E. Harkins suggests in his foreword, hegemonic during much of the period.It affected dance and popular music as well as film. Rather than an expression ofpopular creativity, however, it was largely the product of individual talents. In hisstudy, Miller demonstrates, for the first time, how a folklore "cottage industry" wasestablished to disseminate Party propaganda throughout the Soviet Empire in the1930s and how scholars collaborated in this endeavor.Miller begins with an overview of folklore research and collection from theseventeenth century onward. Paradoxically, while folk traditions were declining inpopular appeal by the Revolution of 1917, folklore had become a thriving field ofinquiry among scholars. By 1934, Harkins points out, the leading folklorist, IuriiSokolov, argued that Russian folklore was a branch of literary scholarship and aweapon of class conflict. In that same year Maxim Gorky, praising the artistry foundin folklore, claimed that it drew its inspiration from "concrete life" rather than frommythic or religious notions and expressed the true aspirations of the masses. Folklorists,Miller shows, were henceforth assured of official support for their work. By1937 this support involved direct Party supervision. Not only were traditional genresreinterpreted by scholars to accord with Marxist-Leninist dogma, but even the collectingof folklore was determined by ideological criteria. A new folklore began toappear. It eulogized Lenin, Stalin, and the October Revolution and was disseminatedin newspapers and journals as well as through performances. The best known performer,Marfa Kriukova, coined the term novina to distinguish her work from thetraditional starına. In this pseudofolklore created by individuals versed in traditionalgenres, Lenin and Stalin were given the traits of bylina figures, bogatyry or knights.Other heroes, like Chapaev, were seen as martyrs and saints who had sacrificed theirlives for the motherland. The authors of these "epics" had acquired much of their