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Post-Stalin Trends in Russian Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Victor Erlich
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Extract

Writing about recent Soviet literature is a hazardous occupation. A Western chronicler of the post-Stalin literary ferment is as likely to overestimate an ephemeral trend as he is to miss a significant cue. He must be equally wary of premature euphoria and premature impatience. Last but not least, he has to do his best to maintain a viable balance between literary and political considerations.

The latter question was raised sharply by Mr. Andrew Field, a keen if somewhat petulant student of modern Russian literature. Mr. Field deplored the tendency prevalent in the West to discuss recent Soviet imaginative writing sub specie of its alleged ideological heterodoxy rather than of its literary texture.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 1964 , pp. 405 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1964

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References

1 Andrew Field, “The Not So Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature,” The New Leader, Dec. 24, 1962.

2 Irving Howe, “Predicaments of Soviet Writing,” I, The New Republic, May 12, 1963.

3 Gibian, George, Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature during the Thaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960)Google Scholar; McLean, Hugh and Vickery, Walter, eds., The Year of Protest: 1956 (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

4 () (Munich, 1957), p. 17.

5 The Yogi and the Commissar (New York, 1946), pp. 186-92.

6 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), pp. 209-10.

7 Why did Khrushchev authorize publication of so explosive a document? My guess is that he chose to use Solzhenitsyn's novel as a club with which to beat his “Stalinist” opponents. He may have well realized since that he had been playing with fire. If so, this was not the first time Khrushchev's impetuosity boomeranged.

8 Howe, op. cit.

9 In the otherwise admirable introduction to the Praeger version of One Day, the novel is referred to as a “literary masterpiece.” Writing about Solzhenitsyn in The Kenyon Review, F. D. Reeve found it possible to proclaim his book one of the greatest works of twentieth-century European fiction. Such extravagant assertions are both misleading and self-defeating. Blatant overestimates of the literary worth of “dissonant” Soviet writings serve only to confirm the preconceptions of such critics as Mr. Anthony West. His recent New Yorker review of A. Tertz's Fantastic Stories is one of his snootiest performances since that high-handed attempt to reduce Orwell's disturbing insight to personal morbidity.

10 “New Voices in Russian Writing,” Encounter, Apr., 1963.

11 Cf. “Khrushchev on Culture,” Encounter, Pamphlet No. 9, p. 30.

12 For a lucid discussion of this point see George Gibian, “Soviet Literature during the Thaw,” in Max Hayward and Leopold Labedz, eds., Literature and Revolution in Soviet Russia, 1917-62 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 135-37.

13 V. Tarsis, The Bluebottle (New York, 1963), p. 55.

14 Patricia Blake and Max Hayward, eds., Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), p. 265.

15 Howe, op. cit.

16 Gleb Struve, Soviet Russian Literature, 1917-1950 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), pp. 83-85.

17 Cf. “Letter from a Soviet Writer,” The New Leader, Dec. 9, 1963.

18 Blake and Hayward, op. cit., p. 305. (In several instances I have found it necessary to tamper with the translation.)