tlie novel gives the "true" version of Christ's encounter with Pilate. The result is a joyful philosophical comedy of enormous profundity. Other masterpieces that did not fit the canons of socialist realism and were not published until many years later include the dark pictures of rural and semi-urban Russia by An drey Platonov (1899-1951), The Foundation Pit (1973) and Chevengur (1972).
The need to rally support in the Second World War brought a loosening of Communist Party control. The war itself created the opportunity for a large "second wave" of emigration, thus feeding emigre literature. However, the period from 1946 until the death of Stalin in 1953 was one of severe repression known as the Zhdanovshchina, or Zhdanovism, after Andrey Zhdanov, a Politburo member and the director of Stalin's programme of cultural tyranny. During this campaign, attacks on "rootless cosmopolitans" involved anti-Semitism and the rejection of all foreign influences on Russian literature. The Soviet practice of samokritika (public denunciation of one's own work) was frequent.
The years from the death of Stalin until the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 saw several "thaws" separated by "freezes". In 1956 Khrushchev delivered a famous speech denouncing certain Stalinist crimes. From that time on, it was possible for Russians to perceive orthodox communists as people of the past and to regard dissidents not as holdovers from before the revolution but as progressives. New writers and trends appeared in the 1950s and early 1960s. Vibrant young poets such as Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Andrey Voznesensky exerted a significant influence, and Alek- sandr Solzhenitsyn emerged from a Soviet prison camp (Gulag) and shocked the country and the world in 1962 with details of his brutal experiences in One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, "Youth" prose on the model of American writer J. D, Salinger appeared as well, particularly in the work of Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Voynovich,
By the late 1960s, however, most of these writers had again been silenced. The harsher years under Leonid Brezhnev following Khrushchev's fall opened with the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of two writers, Andrey Sinyavsky (whose pseudonym was Abram Terts) and Yuly Daniel (pseudonym Nikolay Arzhak), for publishing "anti-Soviet propaganda" abroad. In the years that followed, well-known writers were arrested or, in one way or another, expelled from the Soviet Union, thus generating the third wave of emigre literature. Among those who found themselves in the West were Brodsky, Sinyavsky, Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov, and Voynovich.
That trend in Russian literature towards speaking the truth about moral and political issues was exemplified in the work and life of Solzhenitsyn. Arrested initially for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin, Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in prisons and labour camps, followed by three more years in enforced exile. Rehabilitated in 1956, he was allowed to settle in Ryazan, in central Russia, where he became a mathematics teacher and began to write. Encouraged by the loosening of government restraints on cultural life, Solzhenitsyn submitted his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) to the leading Soviet literary periodical, Novy Mir ("New World"). Based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences, Ivan Denisovich describes a typical day in the life of an inmate of a forced-labour camp during the Stalin era. The impression made on the public by the book's simple, direct language and by the obvious authority with which it treated the daily struggles and material hardships of camp life was magnified by its being one of the first Soviet literary works of tlie post-Stalin era to directly describe such a life. The book produced a political sensation both abroad and in the Soviet Union, where it inspired a number of other writers to produce accounts of their imprisonment under Stalin's regime. Interestingly, Khrushchev personally saw to its publication as part of his de-Stalinization campaign.
Solzhenitsyn's period of official favour proved to be shortlived, however. Ideological strictures on cultural activity in the Soviet Union tightened with Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964, and Solzhenitsyn met first with increasing criticism and then with overt harassment from the authorities when he emerged as an eloquent opponent of repressive government policies. Denied the option of official publication, he resorted to samizdat literature and publication abroad - and it was this that secured his international literary reputation. Probably his most celebrated work was The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973 after a copy of the manuscript had been seized in the Soviet Union by the KGB. Various sections of the work describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag's victims as practised by the Soviet authorities over four decades. This work, arguably the greatest work of Soviet prose, narrates the history of the Soviet camp system with controlled fury and in an ironic mode reminiscent of the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon. It is all the more remarkable in that much of the raw material for the book was committed to memory during Solzhenitsyn's imprisonment.
Inevitably, the Soviet press immediately attacked the work and, despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and charged with treason on February 12, 1974. On the following day he was exiled from the Soviet Union. In December he took possession of his
Nobel Prize and later settled in the United States; he returned to Russia from exile only in 1994,
Practically the only valuable writing published between the late 1960s and early 1980s came from the "village prose" writers, who treated the clash of rural traditions with modern life in a realistic idiom: the most notable members of this group are the novelist Valentin Rasputin and the short-story writer Vasily Shukshin. The morally complex fiction of Yury Trifo- nov, staged in the urban setting (The House on the Embankment, 1976), stands somewhat apart from the works of Rasputin and Shukshin that praise Russian rural simplicity. Nevertheless, as with the 1930s and 1940s, the most important literature of this period was first published outside the Soviet Union. Notable writers include Variam Shalamov, whose exquisitely artistic stories chronicled the horrors of the prison camps; Sinyavsky, whose complex novel Goodnight! appeared in Europe in 1984, long after he had been forced to leave the Soviet Union; and Venedikt Yerofeyev, whose grotesque latter- day picaresque Moscow-Petushki - published in a clandestine edition in 1968 - is a minor classic. Some of the best work published in the 1980s was in poetry, including the work of conceptualists such as Dmitry Prjgov and the meta-mctaphoric poetry of Aleksey Parshchikov, Olga Sedakova, Ilya Kutik, and others.
The effects on literature of the collapse of the Soviet Union were enormous. The period of glasnost under Gorbachev and the subsequent collapse of the USSR led first to a dramatic easing and then to the abolition of censorship. Citizenship was restored to emigre writers, and Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. Doctor Zhiuago and We were published in Russia, as were the works of Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Voynovich, and many others. The divisions between Soviet and emigre and between official and unofficial literature came to an end. Private foundations began awarding annual literary prizes, such as the Russian Booker Prize and the Little Booker Prize, The so- called Anti-Booker Prize - its name, a protest against the British origins of the Booker Prize, was selected to emphasize that it was a Russian award for Russian writers - was first presented in 1995 by the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.