The need to rally support in World War II brought a loosening of Communist Party control. The war itself created the opportunity for a large “second wave” of emigration, thus feeding émigré literature. The period from 1946 until the death of Stalin in 1953 was one of severe repression known as the zhdanovshchina, or Zhdanovism. 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. Thaws and freezes
The years from the death of Stalin until the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 saw several “thaws” separated by “freezes.” Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel Ottepel (1954; The Thaw) provided this term for a period of relative liberalism. 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. 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 émigré literature. Among those who found themselves in the West were Brodsky, Sinyavsky, Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Aksyonov, Georgy Vladimov, Vladimir Voynovich, and Aleksandr Zinovyev.
Significant literary works written in the post-Stalin years include Pasternak’s poetic novel set at the time of the Revolution, Doctor Zhivago (first published in Italy in 1957), which sees life’s meaning as transcending politics. Sinyavsky’s book-length essay Chto takoye sotsialistichesky realizm? (1956; On Socialist Realism), attacking Socialist Realist aesthetic doctrine and advocating the use of fantasy, and a number of “phantasmagoric works,” including Lyubimov (1961–62; The Makepeace Experiment), were published abroad. Charged with being the author of these works, Sinyavsky was tried and imprisoned in 1966. Some have considered the transcripts of his trial to be one of his most interesting “works.” After his emigration to France in 1973 he published the novel Spokoynoy nochi (1984; Goodnight!) under the name Terts and Osnovy sovetskoy tsivilizatsii (1989; Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History) under the name Sinyavsky.
A movement called “village prose” cultivated nostalgic descriptions of rural life. Particularly noteworthy is Valentin Rasputin’s elegiac novel Proshchaniye s Matyoroy (1976; Farewell to Matyora) about a village faced with destruction to make room for a hydroelectric plant. The novel’s regret for the past and suspicion of the new dramatically marks the difference between village prose and the Socialist-Realist collective farm novel. Yury Trifonov wrote about what he called “the ordeal of ordinary life” in Dom na naberezhnoy (1976; The House on the Embankment) and Starik (1978; The Old Man). Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s plays portray family life; her collection of stories Bessmertnaya lyubov (1988; Immortal Love) could be published only under Mikhail Gorbachev. Works first published in full in the West and in fundamental ways critical of Soviet ideology and culture include Andrey Bitov’s experimental novel Pushkinsky dom (1978; Pushkin House), Venedikt Yerofeyev’s alcoholic, hallucinatory novel Moskva-Petushki (1977; Moscow to the End of the Line), Zinovyev’s Ziyayushchiye vysoty (1976; The Yawning Heights), and Voynovich’s satire Zhizn i neobychaynyye priklyucheniya soldata Ivana Chonkina (1975; The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin).
Solzhenitsyn first earned fame with Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (1963; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), an understated novel about the horrors of a Soviet camp. As part of his de-Stalinization campaign, Khrushchev personally saw to its publication. Under Brezhnev, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the U.S.S.R. Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag GULag, 1918–1956: opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya, 3 vol. (1973–75; The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation) is arguably the greatest work of Soviet prose. It narrates the history of the Soviet camp system with controlled fury and in an ironic mode reminiscent of the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon. Post-Soviet literature
Almost no one expected the Soviet Union to come suddenly to an end. The effects of this event on literature have been enormous. The period of glasnost (verbal openness) under Gorbachev and the subsequent collapse of the U.S.S.R. led first to a dramatic easing and then to the abolition of censorship. Citizenship was restored to émigré writers, and Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. Doctor Zhivago and We were published in Russia, as were the works of Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Voynovich, and many others. The divisions between Soviet and émigré and between official and unofficial literature came to an end. Russians experienced the heady feeling that came with absorbing, at great speed, large parts of their literary tradition that had been suppressed and with having free access to Western literary movements. A Russian form of postmodernism, fascinated with a pastiche of citations, arose, along with various forms of radical experimentalism. During this period, readers and writers sought to understand the past, both literary and historical, and to comprehend the chaotic, threatening, and very different present.
Citation Information
Article Title: Russian literature
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 12 March 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/art/Russian-literature
Access Date: August 26, 2019
Additional Reading
General histories and handbooks of Russian literature include D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, from Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. by Francis J. Whitfield (1958); Victor Terras (ed.), Handbook of Russian Literature (1985); Victor Terras, A History of Russian Literature (1991); and Charles A. Moser (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, rev. ed. (1992).
Histories of specific periods or genres are found in the following texts: Dmitrij C̆iževskij (Dimitrij Tschižewskij), History of Russian Literature from the Eleventh Century to the End of the Baroque (1960, reprinted 1981); N.K. Gudzǐy (N.K. Gudzi), History of Early Russian Literature, ed. by Susan Wilbur Jones (1949, reissued 1970; originally published in Russian, 2nd ed., 1941); Simon Karlinsky, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (1985); William Edward Brown, A History of Seventeenth-Century Russian Literature (1980), A History of 18th-Century Russian Literature (1980), and A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, 4 vol. (1986); William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (1986); William Mills Todd III (ed.), Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800–1914 (1978); Marc Slonim, The Epic of Russian Literature from Its Origins Through Tolstoy (1950, reissued 1975), and Modern Russian Literature from Chekhov to the Present (1953); Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (1968); Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature Since the Revolution, rev. and enlarged ed. (1982); Gleb Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953 (1971); Boris Groys (boris Groĭs), The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (1992; originally published in German, 1988); John Garrard and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (1990); Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine, 3rd ed. (1981); Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel, 2nd ed. (1985); Kathleen F. Parthé, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (1992); and Harold B. Segel, Twentieth-Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present, updated ed. (1993).