The language of domestic squabble: desacralizing the soviet art in Ivan Shevtsovs novel "Tlya" (1964)

After its publication in 1964, the novel Tlya (The Plant Louse) by Ivan Shevtsov caused a heated social and literary scandal. The scandal is analyzed in the context of public history of the Soviet art. One of the reasons for the ostracism toward the novel was the fatal incongruity of its rhetoric with the dynamics of discursive and aesthetic directives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the early 1960s - from Khrushchev's visit to the Manege avant-garde exhibition, to the article Iskusstvo Geroicheskoy Epokhi (The Art of Heroic Epoch, July 1964) that summarized the results of the meetings of the party and government leaders with literary and artistic figures. Building on the rhetoric and ideology of the campaign against cosmopolitanism, Shevtsov's novel could correlate with the first phase of the process. However, by the time of its publication, the party's rhetoric had significantly changed. In 18 months, the discursive and aesthetic directives of the CPSU evolved from a totally uncompromising attitude to derogation of the canon to a more flexible and tolerant formula of the diversity of artistic forms and styles within a consistent artistic method and to the declaration of competition of artistic individualities. In that new rhetorical context, Shevtsov's novel appeared as a Stalinist challenge to the party politics. An equally important reason for the public rejection of the novel was its either voluntary or non-voluntary desacralization of the art sphere. While deconstructing the dominant rhetoric of art as a heroic serving, Shevtsov uncovered the camouflaged competition for the positions in the art field. In a critic's words, "the complex process of the Soviet intelligentsia's struggle for establishing the principles of Socialist Realism was reduced by Ivan Shevtsov to squabbles, bickering, and fuss around the piece of a fat-laden pie". For the literary establishment, the shift of focus from the lofty rhetoric of artistic life to its casual hidden motive was felt as a traumatic denouncement.