Writing factory Former Party member Andrei Klimentov could no longer write. He took up a position in the Voronezh Provincial Land Administration, working on electrification and land reclamation. His engineering work satisfied his need to DO SOMETHING IN THE WORLD, but, even while laying those practical threads out to the countryside and its people, he felt also the emptiness of the earth and materials that he worked with. He missed his literary life only during the brief moments of such feeling, generally palpable in the evenings or pauses during the day. What could replace the CONTEMPLATIVE SATISFACTION of literature without also meaning a withdrawal, once again, from the land? With a few other former Proletkult members, Klimentov appropriated part of the old Dutch tile factory, whose bourgeois owners had abandoned it after the revolution. Their task was to bring into being the first Soviet FACTORY OF LITERATURE, a factory that would itself ultimately rely on the very technical infrastructures that they were putting in place: NETWORKS of power and information. It was to allow the people’s own words to come together and be made, through the work of editing, writing and criticism, into the land’s own meaning. Already the workers’ thoughts rose off them, in their everyday speech, in the tense sculpting of their sinews—a work of contemplation was needed that could do justice to this activity of the people. At first, it was the job of the factory’s too-small work unit to collect the PEOPLE’S DATA—the people’s sentences, myths and beliefs, as spoken to one another and to interviewers, as well as the impressions of the factory workers, noted down under a series of headings in their notebooks. This material was then brought back to the factory, where it was to remain unaltered. No ‘literary’ language was to be imposed on it. The work of the factory staff was to allow it to be written—to give it form and existence as written language. Such language was compiled, edited, ‘written’ as the work of the people. The writing factory MINED the people’s data; it produced the data and transformed it and it PRODUCED AND TRANSFORMED THE PEOPLE in the process. But because the data was also unaltered, the factory simply took part in THE PEOPLE’S PRODUCTION AND TRANSFORMATION OF ITSELF. It is hard to tell now whether this project failed to be noticed by the Soviet authorities, or whether it was not considered useful to the forward march of the revolution. In any case it failed to receive the support of the Party and the State.
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