ABSTRACT

As every Soviet schoolboy and schoolgirl was made to memorize, the Soviet Union covered “one-sixth” of the earth’s landmass. The concept of the “one-sixth” was worked into early Soviet popular imagination by Dziga Vertov’s 1926 film One-sixth of the World [Shestaia chast’ mira]. By the end of the 1960s the phrase had been popularized to such an extent that the poet Joseph Brodsky was able to use its ironic reversal, the “five-sixths,” in reference to the world outside the Soviet Union, that is, the world out of his and his readers’ reach. 1