Mass culture to master: Literary metamorphoses of early Soviet satire

This dissertation analyzes the cultural and literary significance of satiricial elements in early Soviet prose. My project examines Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Yuri Olesha's Envy, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, and Mikhail Zoshchenko's prose trilogy (Youth Restored, The Sky-Blue Book and Before Sunrise) as literary works that incorporated and transformed the writers' NEP-era satirical sketches written for a mass reader. Using the language, characterization and rhetorical structure of the satirical feuilleton, each author uniquely co-opted the conventions of this didactic genre in the creation of a complex, modernist aesthetic. I argue that for these writers, the NEP (New Economic Policy 1922-1928) years represented a time of literary success and prominence. As active participants in the early Soviet project of studying and responding to a common reader, the writers continued to anachronistically draw on this ethos even after satire was no longer sanctioned by the State.;My approach establishes a middle ground between poetic and political readings; I demonstrate that these authors referenced their early careers in journalistic satire as a means to connect with an imagined Soviet reader, but their artistic re-interpretations of NEP-era mass culture did not coincide with the conventions of Socialist realism. In addition to establishing a cultural framework which recasts the authors and their creations in a new historical light, each chapter offers an innovative, new perspective on these well-loved masterpieces.;In chapter one, I posit that in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita the author addresses the uneducated readers of the feuilleton in an effort to teach them about pre-revolutionary values and culture. Chapter two analyzes Yuri Olesha's use of satirical stereotypes in his novel Envy as a means to explore whether human beings have changed internally after the revolution. The third chapter demonstrates the creative transformation of NEP-era satirical language into poetic self-expression in Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit. The last chapter documents Zoshchenko's adaptation of the "proletarian writer" psychology in the writing his prose trilogy.