2025 Theses Doctoral

Field under Constraint: Soviet Literary Journals and Autonomy in Soviet Literary Life

Franklin, Daria

Field under Constraint: Soviet Literary Journals and Autonomy in Soviet Literary Life examines how autonomy in cultural production can emerge and be sustained within institutions expressly designed to suppress it. Focusing on six major Soviet literary journals between 1956 and 1990, the dissertation argues that autonomy in Soviet literature was not confined to dissident or underground activity but was embedded in official institutions themselves. Drawing on archival records, editorial correspondence, interviews, and a large bibliographic dataset (more than 35,300 publications), it demonstrates that journals developed distinctive repertoires and discretionary strategies in response to shifting political campaigns, institutional ambiguities, and audience expectations.

Theoretically, the study integrates Bourdieu’s field theory with insights from theories of gradual institutional change. It shows that autonomy was relational, incremental, and situational, devised through the contradictions between political authority and literary legitimacy, and sustained through editorial practices of discretion. By combining structural analysis with qualitative case studies of Iunost’, Znamia, and Oktiabr’, the dissertation reveals how journals transformed their assigned role as instruments of ideological dissemination into precarious yet durable sites of innovation and change. More broadly, it demonstrates that authoritarian systems are never fully closed. The very institutions designed to enforce conformity generated contradictions that enabled autonomy.