While the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry has expanded considerably in recent decades, little attention was paid to most of the poetry written about World War One for almost a hundred years. The conflict occupied a marginal position in Soviet-era cultural memory; many of the poets who wrote about it were similarly sidelined, although the war was commemorated by émigrés. The poetic response to the war was aesthetically diverse and expressed attitudes ranging from an enthusiastic embrace of patriotic duty to pacifism. There were few ‘soldier poets’: Nikolai Gumilev was among the very few established or aspiring poets who actively pursued front-line military service. As the centenary of the war’s outbreak approached, and interest grew in Russia’s imperial history and émigré culture, scholars and editors have begun to introduce readers to this unfamiliar poetic legacy. The process of forming a canon of World War One poetry is only just beginning.

World War II proved to be an enduring theme in literature by Soviet writers, particularly in work written by the generation who had experienced the war directly themselves. Yet in the years that followed the end of the war, many young writers returning from the front were silent. Much of what they wrote about the war only began to emerge over ten years after the victory had been won. While the war had been in progress there had been an immediate, lively, and prolific response to it, mostly in the form of poetry, journalism, or short stories. At the end of the war, however, war literature, with a few exceptions, became ponderous and formulaic. The reason for this change can be found in the way the Soviet state understood the role of writers and of literature. Writers were expected to serve the state by producing works on themes approved by the authorities, written in a plain, accessible style, which educated their readers “in the spirit of socialism.” The censors and the critics enforced strict controls over what could be published, and failure to conform could bring about serious consequences. While censorship continued to operate during the war, it had been relaxed to some extent, allowing writers more freedom in their work. As the war came to an end, the state began to tighten its control over literature once more. It was made clear to writers that the war was to be represented and interpreted in certain ways only. This period of repressive cultural control only came to an end after Stalin's death in 1953; significant changes came about after his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, made a speech in 1956 condemning Stalin and the “cult of personality” that had built up around him.

The idea that women had a significant and specifically feminine contribution to make to Russian poetry was a recurring theme among early twentieth-century literary critics. One of the most striking claims came from Nadezhda L'vova, a poet herself, who predicted that “the twentieth century will probably be known to history as the ‘women's century,’ the century which saw the awakening of woman's creative self-awareness.” Indeed, by about 1910 women poets had begun to win recognition from both readers and reviewers on an unprecedented scale. The early 1920s in particular were a time of considerable achievement and promise. Women who had already established their reputations before the 1917 October Revolution were publishing some of their best work, and had been joined by talented newcomers. Judging by the amount and quality of poetry by women being published towards the end of the 1920s, however, things were starting to look rather different. Some women had stopped writing poetry altogether, and turned to other fields such as journalism or translation. Some had emigrated. Many found that they were no longer able to publish their work, and fell silent, or wrote “for the desk drawer.” Almost a quarter of a century later, at the time of Stalin's death in 1953, few of the women who had emerged onto the scene before the late 1920s had managed to publish significant amounts of their work in the Soviet Union.

The concept of war, conflict and struggle was a governing metaphor in the society which developed after 1917. It was also a major part of twentieth-century Russian reality. The Soviet state originated in conflict and confrontation, in revolution and civil war, and continued to define itself in confrontational terms, beset by enemies beyond its borders, as well as those within. As hopes for world revolution receded, and as a new world war approached, sentiments of class solidarity with the international proletariat became overlaid with Russian nationalist attitudes. Increasing emphasis was placed on the unity of the Soviet people, standing proudly isolated in a world of hostile capitalist powers. The revolutionary state became a totalitarian state which required utmost clarity in defining its friends and, particularly, its enemies. The actual identity of the enemy changed with circumstances. During the civil war it was the White Army and foreign interventionists. During the 1930s, failures in industry and agriculture were blamed on ‘wreckers’, allegedly inspired by foreign powers, whose goal was to destroy all the achievements of the new society. The most rapid about-turn was performed in 1939 with the signing of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, when yesterday's fascist enemy became an ally overnight. This preoccupation with enemies, although often used for domestic political manipulation, was far from being a groundless invention. The Soviet Union had few foreign friends. From the late 1920s, Soviet writers warned of a new, inevitable war against fascism; a generation grew up convinced that they were destined to take part in this war.

There is, it could be argued, a good deal more variety in Soviet war poetry than in British poetry written at the same time. Co-existing within the Soviet poetry are solidly Stalinist propaganda pieces, bitter reflections on the selfishness of government officials and grimly realistic evocations of the battlefield. Over time, the versions of ‘Soviet war poetry’ presented by scholars in the USSR have differed according to political circumstances. After Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech denouncing Stalin's crimes, wartime poems which portrayed Stalin vanished from the canon. Some poems printed during the war which expressed hatred of the enemy in particularly forceful terms have either been altered or excluded from later publications. There have been many additions to the canon as a result of relaxations in censorship; the ‘privileged’ status of the war theme probably accelerated this process. Other works simply remained undiscovered for a time, for example poems found on the sites of former German concentration camps. Glasnost' made it possible to publish poems which gave a completely unvarnished picture of battle, as well as work which introduced the subject of Soviet labour camps, political repression and the abuse of privilege in wartime. Apart from written sources, the war produced a good deal of oral verse and song, some of which has been collected, but much of which has probably remained unrecorded.

Although it is now possible to discuss the broad range of wartime literary output, political circumstances in the former Soviet Union have meant that the literature of the Second World War, which was once a staple for uncontroversial research, has been largely dismissed as a relic of the discredited past.

The Soviet fight against Nazi invaders is known in Russia as the ‘Great Fatherland War’, a title which evokes the ‘Fatherland War’ of 1812 against Napoleon. Both wars nearly proved disastrous for the state, but ended in resounding victory against an enemy believed by many to be invincible. The 1941–1945 war was enshrined as a central part of official Soviet culture, providing an enduring theme for writers and film-makers as well as sculptors and architects who designed vast and suitably-termed ‘memorial complexes’ constructed during the 1960s and 1970s to commemorate the suffering and courage of Soviet citizens. The memory of the past was kept alive to remind the population that the country's present was fought for at massive human and material cost, a reminder calculated to stifle potential dissatisfaction.

In 1985, forty years after the war ended, the poet Joseph Brodsky described this use of the war's legacy:

During the Second World War, Soviet writers were urged to ‘equate the pen with the bayonet’, in other words, to use their literary talent as a weapon against the enemy. In its original context, Vladimir Maiakovskii's 1925 poem ‘Domoi!’ (Homewards!), however, it was not the idea of the word as a weapon which was uppermost in his comparison of pen and bayonet, but the idea of the mass production of poetry in accordance with the state's plan. In the poem Maiakovskii expresses the wish that he should be given tasks for the year by Gosplan (the state planning agency), that his lips should be padlocked at the end of the working day, and that Stalin should report to the Politburo about recent increases in the understanding of poetry. The tone of the poem is humorous and ironic, but the readiness of the poet, even in jest, to give up his artistic freedom is alarming. The meaning of the desire to equate the pen with the bayonet can, therefore, be interpreted as a wish to write to order, a rejection of autonomy.

It is the aim of this book to explore the extent to which poets in wartime actually did ‘write with the bayonet’, producing work which conformed to official expectations, and also the ways in which poets were able to set their own agenda, taking advantage of the greater creative freedom the war afforded them.

Much of the work produced by Soviet writers in the Stalinist period can be criticised for being repetitive and formulaic, and the principal reason for this fault is usually identified as socialist realism, the literary method imposed on writers by the state. Although there were signs of change and originality in some of the poetry written and published during the war years, a good deal of it conforms to expectations by dealing with a narrow range of themes in standardised language. The most consistently-used theme in Soviet poetry during four years of war, and one associated with a markedly formulaic treatment, was that of heroism. The heroism evoked is not that of the faceless masses, but of individuals whose actions are performed in the spirit of self-sacrifice. A typical poem by Sergei Vasil'ev, not a major poet, adopts the theme, widespread in wartime poetry, of the signaller who dies while repairing communications lines. His corpse is found, as so often in poems on the subject, with the wires clenched between his teeth. Some poets restrict themselves to this proof of devotion to duty after death, but Vasil'ev includes a plethora of other details as supporting evidence:

Boris Slutskii pointed out that there was one section of Soviet society which had gained something from the war. While others had lost limbs, writers had acquired an assortment of things:

(Some—memory. Some—recollections. Some—nervous laughter, some light sleep. Some—just a list of the dead, fifty or a hundred persons. Some—plots. Some—just themes. Some—a sense of duty and guilt before those who died early, those who did not return from the war.)

Of this list, it is the final item, the awareness of the debt owed by the living to the dead, which receives most of Slutskii's attention in this poem. The memory of the war dead and the commemoration of the victory they had died to bring about is a constant theme in post-war poetry, one shared by the literary establishment and those on its margins, though each group naturally had its own interpretation of the theme. The war as a literary theme should not be considered as being the exclusive property either of conformist writers or of writers critical of the state. That the defeat of fascism had been a tremendous achievement, and that the people of the Soviet Union had undergone terrible suffering was beyond debate.