2025/07/14 by Julia Vaingurt · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society #Soviet and Russian History #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/russ.70065
openalex publication_date 2025/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Devin Fore. Soviet Factography: Reality Without Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 320 pp. 37.50. ISBN 978-0-226-23486-1. 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 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 contradictory and often sketchy set of factographic practices into a coherent and highly readable theoretical framework. The result is something between a manifesto, resolute in its defense of the method, and a technical manual, a rigorously structured study of its operative mechanisms. Fore’s aim is not to interrogate the sustainability or internal contradictions of factography but to reconstruct its method with meticulous precision and to defend it against its past and future detractors. As the subtitle suggests, Fore’s central theoretical intervention lies in the articulation of the discontinuity between reality and realism, or avant-garde factography and socialist realism. This insistence on rupture stands in stark contrast to Boris Groys’s influential argument positing continuity between the avant-garde and socialist realism, even though this disagreement is not spelled out and the art theoretician is not named. According to Fore’s punchy argument, the factographers (and, most paradigmatically, Sergei Tret'iakov) were true materialists: they documented emergent realities without imposing ideological frameworks or narrative coherence. Fore adduces Nikolai Chuzhak’s argument that realists, by contrast, are idealists; they organize facts into stories, which require synthesizing and shaping experience in accordance with mental schemas, ideological objectives, and language conventions (p. 53). The scintillating implication is that realism is inherently teleological, totalizing, and potentially totalitarian, but the factographic approach to reality resists totality. Fore proceeds to painstakingly examine all constitutive parts of the factographic practice to demonstrate its rootedness in materialist epistemology, marked by its openness to contingency and discontinuity. Fore writes as if from within the movement, adopting its epistemic and stylistic commitments. From the outset, he appears to model his own writing on the core values of the factographers (as identified in his monograph): clarity over ambiguity, systematization over speculation, and descriptive fidelity over interpretive engagement. Like his heroes the factographers, he values the immediacy of contact with his object of study, choosing not to engage with other scholars’ assessments of the practice. When critiques do arise, they tend to originate from the factographers’ contemporaries and are reframed as strategic or deliberate aspects of the method. Fore argues that factography emerged as a response to the proliferation of new recording technologies and was an attempt to transform literature from a tool of self-expression into a tool of documentation and connectivity. Like the factographers themselves, who sought to reconfigure literature as a technology of recording and investigation, Fore seeks to rationalize their project through systematic, even structuralist, analysis. First, he breaks down the practice into four fundamental axes of creative practice, each of which becomes the organizing logic of a chapter: practitioner, reader, content, and form. Chapter 1, “The Facts Against the Image,” explores the transformation of the writer into a recording machine—a selfless, neutral observer, a “mere conduit for relaying surrounding events and phenomena,” replacing a subjective image-producer (p. 41). Chapter 2, “Overcoming the Delay,” centers on the reader or viewer, now recast as an alert machine, receiving and reacting to “physical stimuli that had less in common with literary metaphor and the syntax of the imagination than with the bells and flashing lights found in a psychotechnical laboratory” (p. 81). Chapter 3, “Paradigms of Factography,” considers the material—focusing on the objects and characters the factographers sought to record—singular entities that nevertheless came to stand (therefore, Fore, following the factographers themselves, refers to them as “standards”) as paradigmatic representatives of new social phenomena (p. 154). Chapter 4, “The Fatal Question,” takes up the issue of form, tracing the shift from plot to montage, from narrative continuity to modular juxtaposition. In this chapter, Fore intriguingly engages with the uncomfortable, from the perspective of historical materialism, questions of risk, accident, and chance in order to demonstrate the most jarring distinction between factography and socialist realism. Fore points out the political incorrectness of the factographers’ partiality toward historical chance: “For books published in the era of Five-Year Plans, Tret'iakov’s kolkhoz collections in fact turn out to be willfully, even dangerously skeptical of the idea of centralized planning and its presumption to control the future” (p. 183).3 Second, Fore’s analysis, as evident from the brief summaries of the chapters above, rests on the structuring power of binary oppositions. To sharpen the sense of conceptual clarity, Fore uses interrelated binaries to define and organize his terms; every aspect of the practice is presented in terms of what it is and what it is not. This inheritance from modernism serves Fore well. Fore’s definitions are sharp and revelatory. For example, he truly excels at defining “fact,” as the factographers understood it. I am confident that his definition will become programmatic in the studies of factography, in particular, and the historical avant-garde, in general. Fore tells us that for the factographers, fact is a singular, irreducible occurrence. It resists metaphor, escapes interpretation or judgment, and exists in opposition to “image,” “truth,” and “law.” Unlike images—subjective, imaginative, ideological—facts are concrete and unprocessed. Unlike truth—eternal, continuous, and all-encompassing—facts are singular, concrete, and “do not adhere to a foreseeable logical scheme” (p. 21). And unlike laws—synthetic, teleological, abstract—facts are aleatory, immediate, and present-tense. Furthermore, facts are not derived from laws, but might, in aggregate, allow laws to emerge. The role of the factographer is to identify and accurately record new facts, thereby facilitating their analysis and systematization. To support these key, operative oppositions between facts and laws and facts and images, Fore introduces a secondary binary opposition between imagination and creative fantasy. Imagination is the mental faculty that produces laws and images; thereby, it is internal, generative, and ideological. Imagination would be something that the more utopian-minded LEF colleagues of the factographers, like Vladimir Mayakovsky, might indulge in. By contrast, fantasy, like fact, is material, empirical, and external: fantasy is the everyday miraculous feats of building the first socialist country in the world. The factographers eschew imagination but are attuned to creative fantasy. Fore calls the latter “positivistic, prompt fantasy” (p. 27). In regard to formal solutions, Fore draws a contrast between the genre of the novel, associated with realism and manifesting its orientation toward closure and totality, and the newspaper ocherk, favored by the factographers for its brevity, plotlessness, and modularity.4 Whereas the novel relies on tropes (metaphorical, associative, poetic), the ocherk operates with terms (precise, literal, technical). According to Fore, “metaphors may be imprecise, but their tendency to liaise with other words makes them one of the hardiest, most memorable species in the ecosystem of language. Not so the delicate term, which refuses association and is doomed to a short life as a result of its isolation” (p. 64). Narrative continuity gives way to disjuncture and fragmentariness; plot gives way to montage assembly—connections built not through causality but rhythmic recurrence and affective charge. These oppositions, while perhaps overly neat, are effective in clarifying the aesthetic stakes of factography. Last but not least, all of these oppositions come together to support and are mapped upon the book’s most important distinction, mentioned earlier: reality vs. realism. This distinction is crucial for the book’s goal of separating factography from the ideological and aesthetic programs of socialist realism that supplanted it. By rejecting the conflation of the orientation toward material reality with realism, Fore reclaims factography as a distinct mode of materialist and socialist art. Its refusal of narrative synthesis, he argues, is not a political capitulation to the exigencies of the historical moment that demanded from artists a return to realism but a comprehensible aesthetic strategy that remained true to the avant-garde’s democratic impulse and formal principles: the commitment to presenting the world as it is in all its discontinuity and multiplicity and expressing “activity rather ontology, tendency rather than being” (p. 158). While I found Fore’s argument on “reality without realism” illuminating and persuasive, I was less convinced by his reasoning regarding why factographic practices were progressive and liberating at the time, but why now, in the guise of hyperdocumentation extant on social media, the same set of practices might appear numbing or trivial. Today, we live in the realization of the factographic dream. Factographers were hopeful that new technologies would democratize artistic practices, leading to the creative involvement of the masses. Indeed, we have all become amateur factographers, our lives minutely recorded in modular, bite-size factoids on social media. We document endlessly, often abstaining from synthesis, reflection, or interpretation, and register endlessly, without giving it much thought, the facts of the lives of others. Our technologies have acquired the level of immediacy the factographers could only dream of. Fore’s answer to this is that factographic methods are valuable at the times of transition, for example, the revolutionary period during which the factographers lived. In stagnant times, such as Fore must perceive us to be living in, factographic practices might devolve into distraction and become injurious as they fixate on irrelevant minutia rather than producing critique and new ways of thinking and acting: “pseudo-populist post-truthism that proliferates on the internet today; discontinuous factoids divert us from seeing the larger picture and from making assessments and judgments” (p. 17). In stagnant times, such as ours, art shouldn’t abdicate its ability to judge and critique. This argument is certainly thought-provoking, but considering the timeliness of this discussion for us today, it deserves further elaboration. It raises several questions: Did the factographers really adhere to the practice of objective recording of facts, abstaining from their vision of the world or analytical point of view? Did they not, inevitably, make choices—about what to observe, what to register, what to omit—that involved ideological investments? And if so, can we genuinely speak of an artistic practice (in contrast perhaps to an account on social media) that would be devoid of interpretation? How fair is it to maintain that Dziga Vertov’s strategy in A Sixth Part of the World is that of “declaiming the world rather than explaining it,” when Vertov himself had famously announced in the intertitles, introducing his Man with a Movie Camera, that his is “an experiment in the communist decoding of reality” (p. 138). Isn’t “decoding” a form of explanation or even interpretation? Similarly, while I enjoyed the daring of Fore’s perhaps most provocative claim that Lenin himself could be framed as a factographer, I must admit that this comparison strained my credulity. Adducing Lenin’s account of the first subbotnik as an “exception” in “A Great Beginning,” Fore posits Lenin as a neutral observer of revolutionary spontaneity. Was Lenin—the master strategist and political theorist—at any point a passive recorder of historical anomalies? Even if Lenin presented the subbotnik as a spontaneous eruption of collective will, is this not itself a rhetorical gesture, one calibrated to serve an ideological end? A more distanced analytical approach would have helped Fore address the reservations and critiques of the factographers’ contemporaries as well as attend to the aporias within this highly experimental and multivalent artistic practice. For example, chapter 1 claims that “Tret'iakov’s mechanical auto-correspondence, which transcribed reality onto paper with minimal processing by the author, left the reader with nothing to ponder, no missing content to reconstruct or ambiguities to resolve” (p. 66). But later in the book, Fore concedes that “the factographers refused to mitigate the conflicts,” and that Tret'iakov’s play I Want a Baby produced “not a program but a problem” (p. 158). What is the purpose of this presentation of problems if not to provoke the audience’s critical reflection?5 Similarly, Fore eventually notes that Tret'iakov’s attitude toward facts could be “ironic, affirmative, analytic, and constative”—a far cry from the purely mechanical mode proposed earlier (p. 162). Acknowledging this tension could have allowed Fore to consider the development of Tret'iakov’s thinking about factography and to theorize the difference between intent and effect, or between the theoretical simplicity and the practical complexity of the factographic method. Likewise, a certain aporia arises in relation to temporality. Fore tells us that the factographers sought to eliminate the delay between the event and the inscription, to minimize mediation and maximize immediacy. Yet the practice of montage, Fore notes, emphasizes ruptures and collisions, thereby interrupting and retarding the process of perception. Sometimes, Tret'iakov, this accelerator of time, “would arrest the moment by introducing extraneous detail” (p. 212). Discussing the discordant intrusion of photographs in the text of Tret'iakov’s Summons, Fore writes that “the photographs are not sutured into the text”; instead, Tret'iakov “forces the reader to pause and scrutinize [the facts] for some indication of relevance” (p. 212). There seems to be, then, a contradiction between the desire for synchronicity and the formal requirement for pause and stoppage. This paradoxical temporality is rich with implications, which it would have been exciting to consider. Some of the book’s most striking insights come when Fore discusses facts as “monstrous,” miraculous, accidental, and “irreducible” (p. 231). These adjectives capture the aesthetic and political daring of the factographic enterprise. It seems to me that greater recognition of its internal contradictions would only enhance this enthralling monstrosity. That said, Soviet Factography is an extraordinary work of intellectual vitality. At one point, summarizing the 1930 evaluation by Ilya Ehrenburg, Fore collapses the gap between the review’s present and the time of his own writing and makes a nearly exalted pronouncement: “Factography might not make for good reading now, but one day this anomalous and oddly proportioned child would grow up to become the first communist literature” (p. 171). Brimming with stimulating insights, Fore’s book certainly hastens the arrival of this “one day,” as it successfully transmits the thrill of factography to the reader.