Russian Literature

A

2

Poetry

Poets who had established their reputation before 1917, such as Akhmatova and Mandelstam, continued to write. They encountered increasing difficulty in the 1930s, however, as the Communist regime began pressuring writers to fall into line with its ideology. Akhmatova’s output decreased in the 1930s, and Mandelstam was arrested in 1938 and died in a prison camp shortly thereafter. One poet of great energy and originality, Vladimir Mayakovsky, did throw himself into serving the goals of the revolution. Mayakovsky had achieved a reputation before the revolution as the most talented and flamboyant member of the futurist movement, an avant-garde movement of artists and writers that noisily advocated a total break with tradition and the past (see Futurism). His verse includes both private and public motifs. Touching lyrics of unrequited love reveal a vulnerable, lonely person; these alternate with openly propagandistic declarations of support for the new regime from a loud and confident poetic persona. Mayakovsky’s poetry is always witty and both verbally and rhythmically inventive. He also produced two plays, Klop (1929; The Bedbug, 1960) and Bania (1930; The Bathhouse, 1965), both raucous satires of Soviet bureaucracy.

Boris Pasternak, one of the USSR’s great literary figures, also achieved a reputation before the Russian Revolution, at least among a small but discerning audience. His reputation among broader circles as a major modern poet came with the publication of his collection Sestra moia zhizn’ (1922; My Sister Life, 1983), a cycle of poems celebrating love and nature. Pasternak often used startling imagery and colloquial language, but his verse forms are controlled and disciplined. Apart from another volume of lyrics, Temy i variatsii (Themes and Variations, 1923), Pasternak wrote mainly epic or narrative verse in the 1920s. As the official Writers’ Union assumed control over literature in the 1930s, Pasternak received recognition as a major talent, but he resisted embracing the Soviet regime and virtually ceased to publish original verse for some years after 1935. Two new collections of poems appeared during World War II (1939-1945), when ideological controls over literature were relaxed. During the postwar period, when the government once more clamped down on literature, Pasternak again withdrew from publishing and worked privately on his novel Doktor Zhivago (1957; Doctor Zhivago, 1958).

A

3

Émigré Literature

After the 1917 Revolution, many eminent writers, critics, philosophers, and scholars left Russia to set down new roots in Europe. Paris, France, became the center of émigré intellectual life, although lively émigré communities existed in Berlin, Germany, and other European capitals. Bunin, Kuprin, Merezhkovsky, Zamiatin, poets Viacheslav Ivanov and Marina Tsvetaeva, and many others continued to write in the tradition in which they had begun in Russia. The most original new talent among the émigrés was poet, essayist, and novelist Vladimir Nabokov, a brilliant stylist and highly perceptive and thoughtful artist. The most important of the nine Russian novels he published while living in Berlin are Dar (1937-1938; The Gift, 1963) and Priglashenie na kazn’ (1938; Invitation to a Beheading, 1959). The Gift satirizes émigré life but more importantly explores the nature of art and the process of creation. Invitation to a Beheading is a complex, surrealistic novel that deals with the ironic oppositions between the limited consciousness of a hero and the omniscience of the author. Nabokov immigrated to the United States in 1940, where he began a new career writing in English and became an American writer of great stature.

B

Socialist Realism

Through the 1920s, a relatively broad range of literary groupings enjoyed official tolerance. This tolerance came to an end with the consolidation of power under Joseph Stalin and his decision to establish a planned economy and a collectivized, disciplined society. In 1932 the Communist government abolished all independent literary groupings and replaced them with a single, centralized Union of Soviet Writers. Independent journals and publishing houses also disappeared. At the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, socialist realism was introduced as the only approved artistic method. Socialist realism meant, in practice, the portrayal of Soviet reality from the viewpoint of the Communist Party. It remained the official method in all the arts for the next 50 years.

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Maksim Gorky, in his novel Mother in particular, was hailed as the founder of socialist realism, but officials also cited the works of other party-minded writers of the 1920s as examples of a correct socialist realist approach. Such works included Chapaev (1923; translated 1935) by Dmitry Furmanov, Tsement (1925; Cement, 1929) by Fyodor Gladkov, and Razgrom (1927; The Nineteen, 1929; also known as The Rout) by Aleksandr Fadeyev. The most notable of the works included in the canon of socialist realism was Tikhii Don (1928-1940) by Mikhail Sholokhov. This four-volume epic depicts life among people known as Cossacks from 1914 to the civil war. It was published in English in two volumes: And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) and The Don Flows Home to the Sea (1940). Sholokhov’s novel treats the civil war, in which the Cossacks fought against the Communist Red Army, with surprising impartiality. His later novel of agricultural collectivization, Podniataia tselina (1932-1960; Virgin Soil Upturned, 1935, and Harvest on the Don, 1960), conforms much more closely to Soviet political doctrine but is less successful as literature.

The regime’s strict enforcement of its literary guidelines led some established writers—including Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Olesha, and Babel—to turn to safer activities, such as translation or children’s literature, or to withdraw from literature altogether. The years during World War II saw some relaxation of controls. Although relatively little literature was produced, several significant novels and plays on patriotic themes appeared, including Dni i nochi (1943-1944; Days and Nights, 1945) by Konstantin Simonov and Molodaya gvardiya (1945; The Young Guard, 1958) by Aleksandr Fadeyev. After the war, however, the tenets of socialist realism were enforced even more strictly, and the period from 1946 to the death of Stalin in 1953 was the bleakest in Russian literature of the 20th century.

C

The Thaw

The decade after Stalin’s death saw several thaws, in which restrictions over literature were eased, and freezes, when they were reinstated and intensified. Political leader Nikita Khrushchev, in his efforts to cast off Stalin’s legacy, helped break the ice in 1956 and in 1961 by expanding the limits of what could be said in public. In doing so he encouraged writers seeking free expression.

Novels such as Ottepel’ (1954; The Thaw, 1955) by Ilya Ehrenburg and Ne khlebom edinym (1956; Not by Bread Alone, 1957) by Vladimir Dudintsev, while not of great literary merit, posed questions about Soviet society that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Works that had been banned, either because their authors had fallen victim to Stalin or had emigrated, were reinstated as literature and republished. In the 1960s a new generation of writers turned away from the heroic themes of socialist realism toward personal lyric poetry and short stories. These new works implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) questioned the fundamental tenets of Communist ideology and celebrated private life and small virtues. Some of these works appeared in official literary magazines; others could not be published in the Soviet Union and were circulated in manuscript copies, a phenomenon known as samizdat (self-publishing), or published abroad.

The milder climate of the period encouraged Boris Pasternak to try to publish a novel he had worked on for many years, Doctor Zhivago. It was accepted by a Soviet magazine, then rejected, and finally published in the West in 1957. Pasternak’s hero, a doctor and poet, dramatizes the fate of many intellectuals caught up by the momentous events of war and revolution. Zhivago’s experiences from 1905 to 1929 offer a sweeping panorama of Russian history, but the novel shows less concern with history and politics than with art. Zhivago’s allegiance is not to political systems but to his poetry, and the legacy of his brief but full life is a cycle of poems that form the novel’s concluding section. The novel received acclaim in the West, and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1958, but a bitter campaign against him in the Soviet Union—a result of the novel’s critical attitude toward Communism—forced him to decline the award.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign also allowed the publication of another remarkable short novel, Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (1962; A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When it appeared in the leading Soviet literary magazine, the work caused a sensation with its revelations of the realities of life in prison camps, to which people suspected of anti-Soviet views—including Solzhenitsyn—were sent. The novel is much more than an exposé of the evils of Stalinism, however. Its point of view and colorful language give it enduring and universal value, vividly conveying the mentality of a humble and very human hero as he survives within an inhumane system. Solzhenitsyn’s subsequent novels, Rakovyi korpus (1968; Cancer Ward, 1968) and V kruge pervom (1968; The First Circle, 1968), could not be published in the Soviet Union, because restrictions on writers by then had intensified. Their publication abroad eventually led to an official campaign against Solzhenitsyn that resulted in his expulsion from the country. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970.

Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Bulgakov are two other writers whose works of the 1920s and 1930s largely disappeared during the Stalin era, only to resurface in the 1960s. Platonov’s stories and novels convey the effects on peasants of collectivization—when farmland was forcibly taken over by the state—and industrialization. His utterly original language teasingly undermines the “official” prose of the period. Bulgakov had published plays and sharply satirical stories in the 1920s, but his masterpiece was the novel Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita, 1967). He completed the work shortly before his death in 1940, but it remained unknown until it was published in 1966 and 1967. The novel is an inventive satirical fantasy that features a visit of the devil to Moscow in the 1930s; interconnected with this is a second novel, set in Jerusalem, about Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate.

One of the most interesting literary trends of the 1960s and 1970s was derevenskaia proza (country prose or village prose). Writers such as Vasily Belov, Vladimir Soloukhin, Vasily Shukshin, Valentin Rasputin, and others turned away from the standard subjects and methods of socialist realism to write sympathetically of life in rural, often isolated areas. The characters in their stories and sketches are typically misfits who are alienated from modern urban life, or who have simply been bypassed in the Soviet regime’s rush to develop a modern industrialized and planned society. In some cases, the writers evoke compassion for those who have not been able to share in the benefits of a modern life, but more often their attitude is one of admiration or nostalgia. The writers of country prose suggest that the peasants they write about have remained largely unaffected by modern civilization, and so have retained the traditional ways of life that have disappeared in the cities. More importantly, these peasants are thought to have preserved traditional virtues, which the writers hold up as superior to the wholesale materialism of modern urban life.

D

The End of the Soviet Union

The campaigns against Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn made it clear that the Soviet state would not abandon its efforts to impose its will on writers. A graphic demonstration of the regime’s determination to bring wayward writers into line came in 1966, when the talented critic and scholar Andrei Siniavsky and his colleague Yuly Daniel, a writer and translator, were tried for slandering the Soviet Union in their writings. Both were sentenced to hard labor in prison camps. Writers who refused to fall in line were expelled from the country (as Solzhenitsyn was in 1974) or allowed to emigrate. The most notable among the émigrés was the enormously gifted poet Joseph Brodsky, who left the Soviet Union in 1972 and eventually settled in the United States. His apolitical but pessimistic and ironic poetry draws on both the Russian tradition of Akhmatova and Mandelstam and the heritage of English-language poetry. In 1987 Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, and in 1991 and 1992 served as poet laureate of the United States. Solzhenitsyn, too, moved to the United States.

Through the 1970s and 1980s Soviet critics and writers increasingly ignored the guidelines of socialist realism, except for a few who toed the Communist Party line. Established writers such as Yury Trifonov and Vladimir Tendriakov wrote novels and short stories that honestly and openly explored moral problems of contemporary urban life. Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote poetry of merit while maintaining a generally critical attitude toward the regime.