Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The first and only collection of theoretical writings on factography by the LEF collective, Literatura fakta (1929), opens with a preface that both celebrates achievements and acknowledges limitations.While it proudly declares progress toward fact, it also frankly admits that the anthology cannot yet provide a definitive description of best practices or offer aspiring factographers instructions for use:We cannot yet provide at this point direct guidelines to this literature, since our main efforts during these years were directed toward the exposure of "artistic" corpses, but new documentary literature is already giving us an opportunity to make foundational conclusions on method-on the character of fixation and illumination of fact. 1 The volume then promises to proceed apophatically, through the rejection of undesirable artistic practices, and to sketch a path forward for socialist literature, redirecting it from the illusory domain of verisimilitude toward the material concreteness of truth.The LEF theoreticians acknowledge that much remains unresolved, noting the many challenges ahead:The following questions await solutions: the question of refining the methodology and technique of literature of fact; the question of a synthetic, but also temporally contingent, literary genre; and most importantly, perhaps, the question of reorganizing the work of documentary literature itself on the basis of the division of labor of comrades specialists who are productively interested in capturing the eternally changing biography of a thing. 2 A century later, Devin Fore's Soviet Factography: Reality Without Realism arrives to bring the theoretical cohesion that the original practitioners were unable to attain.This vigorous monograph offers a compelling and eloquent account of this conceptually and aesthetically rich yet understudied chapter of Soviet cultural history.Fore achieves a rare feat: distilling a 1 "Ob etoi knige i o nas.(Predislovie)," in Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed.N.
Source: The Russian Review
Author: Julia Vaingurt
Institution: University of Illinois Chicago
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W4412409083