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ThedecadeafterStalin’s death saw several thaws, in which restrictions over literature were eased, and freezes, when they were reinstated and intensified. Political leader Nikita Khrushchev, in his efforts to cast off Stalin’s legacy, helped break the ice in 1956 and in 1961 by expanding the limits of what could be said in public. In doing so he encouraged writers seeking free expression.
NovelssuchasOttepel’ (1954; The Thaw, 1955) by Ilya Ehrenburg and Ne khlebom edinym (1956; Not by Bread Alone, 1957) by Vladimir Dudintsev, while not of great literary merit, posed questions about Soviet society that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Works that had been banned, either because their authors had fallen victim to Stalin or had emigrated, were reinstated as literature and republished. In the 1960s a new generation of writers turned away from the heroic themes of socialist realism toward personal lyric poetry and short stories. These new works implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) questioned the fundamental tenets of Communist ideology and celebrated private life and small virtues. Some of these works appeared in official literary magazines; others could not be published in the Soviet Union and were circulated in manuscript copies, a phenomenon known as samizdat (self-publishing), or published abroad.
Themilderclimateof the period encouraged Boris Pasternak to try to publish a novel he had worked on for many years, Doctor Zhivago. It was accepted by a Soviet magazine, then rejected, and finally published in the West in 1957. Pasternak’s hero, a doctor and poet, dramatizes the fate of many intellectuals caught up by the momentous events of war and revolution. Zhivago’s experiences from 1905 to 1929 offer a sweeping panorama of Russian history, but the novel shows less concern with history and politics than with art. Zhivago’s allegiance is not to political systems but to his poetry, and the legacy of his brief but full life is a cycle of poems that form the novel’s concluding section. The novel received acclaim in the West, and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1958, but a bitter campaign against him in the Soviet Union—a result of the novel’s critical attitude toward Communism—forced him to decline the award.
Khrushchev’sde-Stalinization campaign also allowed the publication of another remarkable short novel, Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (1962; A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When it appeared in the leading Soviet literary magazine, the work caused a sensation with its revelations of the realities of life in prison camps, to which people suspected of anti-Soviet views—including Solzhenitsyn—were sent. The novel is much more than an exposé of the evils of Stalinism, however. Its point of view and colorful language give it enduring and universal value, vividly conveying the mentality of a humble and very human hero as he survives within an inhumane system. Solzhenitsyn’s subsequent novels, Rakovyi korpus (1968; Cancer Ward, 1968) and V kruge pervom (1968; The First Circle, 1968), could not be published in the Soviet Union, because restrictions on writers by then had intensified. Their publication abroad eventually led to an official campaign against Solzhenitsyn that resulted in his expulsion from the country. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970.
AndreiPlatonovandMikhail Bulgakov are two other writers whose works of the 1920s and 1930s largely disappeared during the Stalin era, only to resurface in the 1960s. Platonov’s stories and novels convey the effects on peasants of collectivization—when farmland was forcibly taken over by the state—and industrialization. His utterly original language teasingly undermines the “official” prose of the period. Bulgakov had published plays and sharply satirical stories in the 1920s, but his masterpiece was the novel Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita, 1967). He completed the work shortly before his death in 1940, but it remained unknown until it was published in 1966 and 1967. The novel is an inventive satirical fantasy that features a visit of the devil to Moscow in the 1930s; interconnected with this is a second novel, set in Jerusalem, about Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate.
Oneofthemostinteresting literary trends of the 1960s and 1970s was derevenskaia proza (country prose or village prose). Writers such as Vasily Belov, Vladimir Soloukhin, Vasily Shukshin, Valentin Rasputin, and others turned away from the standard subjects and methods of socialist realism to write sympathetically of life in rural, often isolated areas. The characters in their stories and sketches are typically misfits who are alienated from modern urban life, or who have simply been bypassed in the Soviet regime’s rush to develop a modern industrialized and planned society. In some cases, the writers evoke compassion for those who have not been able to share in the benefits of a modern life, but more often their attitude is one of admiration or nostalgia. The writers of country prose suggest that the peasants they write about have remained largely unaffected by modern civilization, and so have retained the traditional ways of life that have disappeared in the cities. More importantly, these peasants are thought to have preserved traditional virtues, which the writers hold up as superior to the wholesale materialism of modern urban life.
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