The Myth Behind the Mask: Mikail Zoshchenko and the Rebirth of Enthusiasm in the "Spiritual Simplicity" of Jazz

Speaker(s): Jason Cieply, Stanford Humanities Center

Mikhail Zoshchenko’s aesthetic project took shape in the very first years of the Russian Revolution. As such, it was shaped as much by Silver-Age mythology as it was by the cultural theory and political demands of Soviet ideologues. Like many European modernists, Zoshchenko found in Nietzsche’s account of the Apollonian-Dionysian origins of the tragic form a foundational myth for their primitivist cultural projects aimed at reviving decadent artistic forms with the “barbaric” vitality and organic enthusiasm of the working populace. Following Blok, Zoshchenko hailed the rise of the “new poetry of ‘barbarians,’” but he also sympathized with Trotsky, who asserted that proletarian poetry is impossible both now, when the proletariat is occupied with class struggle, and in the future, when they will cease to be the proletariat. Zoshchenko’s solution was to fulfill the function of the Apollonian artist, forging a skaz mask that allowed him to stand in for the non-existent proletarian writer. Possessed by an elemental Dionysian spirit, Zoshchenko gave voice to the “revolutionary consciousness” of the hitherto silent Russian people. Drawing on new scholarship on blackface performance and interpolating from Nietzschean concepts of masking, I offer a close reading of “Spiritual Simplicity,” Zoshchenko’s 1927 short story about shoving on Soviet streets, which he frames with impressions of the stunning arrival of the Chocolate Kiddies, an African-American jazz and dance variety revue, the previous year. In a classic skaz move, Zoshchenko redirects the critical gaze from the black performing artist onto his own narrator, implicating both the crude racism and ideological misappropriation of the Soviet press and his own ambivalent performance of self-simplification. As Zoshchenko comes to recognize in “Spiritual Simplicity,” the grotesque caricature involved in masked performance often obscures the very authentic insight and enthusiasm the performer sets out to capture. This paper captures Zoshchenko at a key juncture in his personal and private life, as he rethinks his aesthetic strategy with an end to embodying a sincere and optimistic outlook consonant with the affective demands of his revolutionary society."