In the years following Stalin's death Akhmatova was slowly, if ambivalently, rehabilitated. A slender volume of her poetry, including some of her translations, was published in 1958. What is perhaps her masterpiece, "Poem without a Hero", on which she worked from 1940 to 1962, was not published in the Soviet Union until 1976. She died, near Moscow, in 1966.
MARINA TSVETAYEVA (1892-1941) Russian poet
After spending most of her youth in Moscow, Tsvetayeva began studies at the Sorbonne in Paris at the age of 16. She published her first poetry collection in 1910. Her verses on the Russian Revolution glorify the anti-Bolshevik resistance, of which her husband was a part. She lived abroad from 1922 to 1939, mostly in Paris, writing varied works including poetry that increasingly reflected nostalgia for her homeland. Many of her best and most typical poetic qualities are displayed in the long verse fairy tale Tsor-dev/tsa (1922; "Tsar-Maiden"). Separated from her husband and daughter and isolated from friends after the evacuation of Moscow, she committed suicide. Though little-known outside Russia, she is considered one of the finest twentieth-century poets in Russian.
the Union of Soviet Writers, which became the state's instrument of control over literature; expulsion from it meant literary death. In 1934 socialist realism was proclaimed the only acceptable form of writing. Henceforth, literature was to he governed by a series of official directives regarding details of style and content in order to ensure that each work offered a "truthful" depiction "of reality in its revolutionary development". Literature had to be "party-minded" and "typical" (that is, avoiding unpleasant, hence "atypical", aspects of Soviet reality), while showing the triumph of fully "positive heroes". Only a few of the works produced in this style have retained some literary interest, notably Fyodor Gladkov's Cement (I925),Niko!ay Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1932—4), and Valentin Katayev's
MIKHAIL SHOLOKHOV {1905-54) Russian novelist
A native of the Don River region, Shotokhov served in the Red Army and joined the Communist Party in 1932. He is best known for the huge novel The Quiet Don, translated in two parts as And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) and T/ie Don Rows Home to the Sea (1940). A portrayal of the struggle between the Cossacks and Bolsheviks, it was heralded in the Soviet Union as a powerful example of socialist realism and became the most widely read novel in Russia. It became controversial when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others alleged that it was plagiarized from the Cossack writer Fyodor Kryukov {d. 1920). Sholokhov's later novels include Virgin Soil Upturned (1932-60). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965.
Time, Forivard! (1932). The moral nadir of Soviet literature was reached in a collaborative volume, Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea (1934). With Gorky as an editor and 34 contributors, the volume praised a project (and the secret police who directed it) that used convict labour and cost tens of thousands of lives.
In addition to official Soviet Russian literature, two kinds of unofficial literature existed. First, a tradition of emigre literature, containing some of the best works of the century, continued until the fall of the Soviet Union. Writing in Russian flourished in communities of anti-communist exiles in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, with writers as various as the novelists Vladimir Nabokov and Yevgeny
Zamyatin, and the theologian-philosophers Vladimir Niko- layevich Lossky, Sergey Bulgakov, and Nikolay Berdyayev, Second, unofficial literature written within the Soviet Union came to include works circulated illegally in typewritten copies [samizdat), works smuggled abroad for publication (tamiz- dat), and works written "for the drawer" or not published until decades after they were written ("delayed" literature). Isolation from the West and from its own literary past was another feature of Russian literature at this time. Whereas pre- revolutionary writers had been intensely aware of western trends, for much of the Soviet period access to western literary movements was severely restricted, as was foreign travel. Access to pre-revolutionary Russian writing was also intermittent. As a result, Russians periodically had to change their sense of the past, as did western scholars when "delayed" works became known.
From a literary point of view, unofficial literature clearly surpasses official literature. Of Russia's five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature during the Soviet period, Bunin emigrated after the revolution, Pasternak had his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) published abroad, Solzhenitsyn had most of his works published abroad and was expelled from the Soviet Union, and Joseph Brodsky published all his collections of verse abroad and was forced to emigrate in 1972. Only Mikhail Sholokhov was clearly an official Soviet writer. Emigres also included the poets Vladislav Khodasevich and Georgy Ivanov. Marina Tsvetayeva, regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, eventually returned to Russia, where she committed suicide. Nabokov, who later wrote in English, published nine novels in Russian, including The Gift (published serially 1937-8) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938). And a modern literary genre, the dystopia,
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1891-1940)
Playwright, novelist, and short-story writer
Bulgakov was born in Kiev and trained as a doctor, but gave up medicine to write. His first major work was the novel The White Guard, serialized in 1925 but never published in book form. A realistic and sympathetic portrayal of the motives and behaviour of a group of anti-Boishevik White officers during the civil war, it was met by a storm of official criticism for its lack of a communist hero. Bulgakov wrote and staged many popular plays in the years 1925-9, including dramatizations of his own novels, but by 1930 his trenchant criticism of Soviet mores had caused him to be effectively prohibited from publishing. His works, known for their scathing humour, include the novella The Heart of a Dog (written 1925), a satire on pseudoscience that did not appear openly in the Soviet Union until 1987, and the dazzling fantasy The Master and Margarita, not published in unexpurgated form until 1973.
was invented by Zamyatin in his novel We (1924), published only abroad, which describes a future socialist society that has turned out to be not perfect but inhuman.
The work now generally regarded as the finest post- revolutionary novel, Mikhail Bulgakov's grotesquely funny The Master and Margarita, was written "for the drawer" (1928—40); it appeared (expurgated) in Russia only in 1966-7 and unexpurgated in 1973. It tells of the Devil and his retinue visiting Soviet Russia, where they play practical jokes of metaphysical and political significance. A novel within