The emotional hero: ideology and subjectivity in early soviet fiction

This dissertation examines the implementation of the theory of the “living man” in Yurii Libedinsky’s Rozhdenie geroia (Birth of a Hero, 1931), Aleksandr Fadeev’s Razgrom (The Rout, 1927), and Anna Karavaeva’s Krutaia stupen’ (Steep Grade, 1931). The “living man” is conceived as an individual whose autonomy is dialectically formed within, and through, the ideological reality he inhabits, engaging with it rather than retreating into purely psychological reflection. While previous studies, most notably Katerina Clark’s model of the ritualised hero, have examined the symbolic function of Soviet literature, little attention has been paid to the cognitive and ideological role of emotions in shaping socialist subjectivity. The research proposes a new interpretative model that integrates the emotional dimension into the construction of socialist subjectivity. It adopts an interdisciplinary social-constructionist approach, combining anthropological and linguistic-cultural perspectives (Wierzbicka, Apresjan) through a semantic analysis of the emotional lexicon. Additionally, it employs narratological tools (Cohn) to examine how modes of interiority reveal characters’ inner discourse. The analysis reveals that emotions, endowed with cognitive and ideological dimensions, act as dynamic agents, generating ideological and narrative choices that structure the plot. Socially charged emotions such as empathy, disgust, shame, and guilt prove crucial for fostering hero development. Among these, shame emerges as the key emotion for recognising violated communal values and for the ideological re-elaboration of the self. These findings reveal that emotional experience operates as a site of negotiation between personal consciousness and ideological formation. The study expands Clark’s model of ritualisation by showing that, within the framework of the “living man”, depersonalisation is overcome through emotional involvement, which becomes a vehicle for ideological internalisation. By foregrounding emotion as a cognitive and ideological force, this study redefines the function of emotions in Soviet literary subject formation. As a result, the Soviet novel appears not merely as an instrument of propaganda but as a space where socialist subjectivity takes shape through individual emotional experience.