time. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the first Thaw in 1956, a broader and more public coming to terms began.
Coming to terms and seeking new terms: from the first Thaw (1956) to the end of the millennium
The first half of the twentieth century in Russian literature can be surveyed in terms of its successive doctrines: Symbolism, Futurism, Acmeism, socialist realism. The second half has conventionally been linked with changes in temperature. The journalist and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) provided the impetus for the “seasonal” metaphor with his minor but immensely influential post-Stalinist novella,
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The Thaw that opened out into a meltdown, initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev (in office 1985–91), became famous around the world as glasnost, literally “openness” or “the right to public voice.”
Thaws were erratic and unreliable. At the peak of the first Thaw in 1956, Aleksandr Fadeyev (b. 1901), competent novelist and dutiful head of the Union of Soviet Writers from 1946 to 1954, felt the ice shifting and shot himself. Even before Stalin’s death, writers began to call for “sincerity” and “honesty” in literature (tentatively, timidly, with a pureness of heart that is now hard to believe). These pioneers discovered, to their astonishment, that they were not expelled from the Writers’ Union or arrested for their outspokenness. Since this premiere post- Stalinist Thaw (1954–56) raised issues repeated in later freezings and meltings right up to the final collapse of communism, a brief look at some of its landmarks will help place our exemplary texts and writers.1
This first Thaw was bracketed by two institutional sensations: the Second Congress of Soviet Writers, called in 1954 after a twenty-year hiatus, and the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, where Khrushchev first officially criticized aspects of Stalinist policy, albeit during a secret session. To be sure, neither Congress publicly entertained the possibility that all of communism – or even all“guidancefromabove”–wasa badthing forwriters,any morethanCatherine the Great, satirizing the abuses of her regime from the safety of her imperial court, had entertained the possibility that serfdom should be abolished or that her autocracy should become less absolute. But this semi-official exposure of state crimes emboldened the liberal critics. The gains of this initial Thaw fall into four categories: rehabilitations of repressed writers, renewed contact with the outside world, newly permitted literary heroes and plots, and an internal criticism of socialist realism itself.
Posthumous rehabilitation, which cleared for public mention and re-publication many writers who had been put to death or silenced, could be disorienting. Often no reasons were given for the initial repression, nor for the sudden return of the victims to official life. Names restored to the Russian canon included Babel, Bulgakov, Platonov, Zoshchenko (who had four more years to live), and Meyerhold – although the fates of these artists had varied widely, from mere reprimand by Stalin-era bureaucrats to the most brutal murder. Zamyatin remained under taboo. National pride could at last be openly registered for the fact that Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), friend of Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Gorky and e?migre? since 1919, had won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933. Also restored to life was Fyodor Dostoevsky. He was not wholly snuffed out during the Stalinera, ofcourse, but unlike the magnificently manipulated and co-opted Tolstoy, Dostoevsky had been under a dark cloud since his massive discrediting by Gorky even before the Revolution. His greatest works
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had been weeded out of libraries and banned from school reading lists. In 1955, Dostoevsky was officially recognized as a “great classic Russian writer” and his collected works reissued to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death.
It became somewhat easier for Russians to see, and be seen by, the outside world. More translations into Russian appeared, many of them on the pages of the newly founded journal
Encouraged by the indifference, or disgust, shown toward the Soviet literary establishment by its more sophisticated colleagues in Eastern bloc countries, some Russian writers began to question the very idea of a single authoritative definition for what literature should do. Initial discussions about socialist realism were guarded and painful. All the “-mindednesses” proclaimed in 1934 (party-, idea-, class-, people-) now seemed tainted. Perhaps writers did not need a “basic method” or a unified goal at all? But the best Russian writers – and their critics, the public intellectuals who wrote about literary art – had always served some higher thing. It was part of their professional definition, that which set Russian literature apart from the rest of the world. Usually this service had been rendered to a collective abstraction: the Russian God, Russian historical destiny, the Russian Word, the People, the good of the nation, the international proletariat, humanity’s moral improvement, a Higher Beauty. Neither self-expression nor market demand seemed a satisfactory substitute. If a socialist realist definition of literary purpose was no longer adequate, should it not yield to some other, more worthy priority?
Moreover, socialist realism, however weird and harsh by Western standards, was Russia’s own invention. With that doctrine in place, she did not have to compete. She was blazing a different path. Reformist calls for more “variety” in plot or character development sounded suspiciously like a defense of those decadent bourgeois novels that Gorky had exhorted Soviet writers to discard. Those novels were still the sop and opiate of the Western world, inclining their readerships to value private life over public duty, illicit love over fidelity, pleasures over economic productivity, doubt and weak closure over faith in the future, and an obsessive curiosity about the darker human impulses. Of course in literature one wanted to hear “confessions rather than sermons” – as one bold essay put it in 1953 – but what was to keep those confessions from becoming
