Open Access

Matthias Schwartz

• It has been mostly forgotten today that Varlam Shalamov had once identified himself as a passionate supporter of the so-called 'nauchno-khudozhestvennaia literatura'. This term is derived from the Russian term for fiction ('khudozhestvennaia literatura') and can be translated as "scientific-fictional literature" but also as "scientific-artistic literature." Hence all of the advocates of the term, including Shalamov, emphatically insisted not only on the "fictionality" ('khudozhestvennost' '), but also on the "skill" or "art" ('iskusstvo') - the "artistic" qualities - as a fundamental element of the new genre, without which its goals could not be achieved. [...] But what kind of genre was this sort of literature, now mostly forgotten, for which Shalamov had so much hope? To answer this question, Matthias Schwartz reconstrucs the conditions in the late 1920s and early 1930s that motivated Maxim Gorky and the then famous children's book author Samuil Marshak, on the eve of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, to launch this compound adjective, 'nauchno-khudozhestvennaia literatura', and to create a new type of literature located at the intersection of literary fiction and science journalism. In highlighting the main arguments around this literature, Schwartz elaborates how difficult and disputed its constitution was in the course of the gradual establishment of Socialist Realism as the singular aesthetic doctrine for literary production and why it did not succeed in establishing itself as a separate literary genre until the postwar period. In the last section Schwartz analyzes the characteristics of one of the most emblematic works written in this literary field before briefly returning to a more generalizing conclusion and taking a look at the modest afterlife of the genre since the Thaw period.