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163 Literary Criticism and World War II, 1941–1945 The war era can be divided into two periods: pre- and post-1943. In the first period, party control over literature was noticeably weakened; celebrations of the party and Stalin were muted, and literary policy, unaccompanied by noisy ideological campaigns, personal denunciations, and attacks, became more benign in comparison with the second half of the 1930s. In the initial period of World War II, Soviet ideology underwent an intensive internal reconstruction, which took the form of the peculiar coexistence of two distinct ideological models: the old one, under which the party alienated itself from the ordinary man, and the new, “humanized” version . This ideological line had been established toward the end of 1941, its substance formulated by Central Committee Secretary of Ideology Aleksandr Shcherbakov: “Our propaganda and agitation must explain through all available means and to the broadest possible masses of workers the national, patriotic (vsenarodnyi, otechestvennyi) character of the war against the German invaders.”1 “Party,” earlier the keyword of such appeals, has here been replaced by “fatherland” (otechestvo) and “Germans.” This new element of a “humanized” ideology of war appeared in Stalin’s very first public address to the people after the start of the war: “Brothers and sisters!” This was the new voice of a state that appealed directly to the masses, bypassing institutional gate-  literary criticism and the institution of literature in the era of war and late stalinism, 1941–1953 evgeny dobrenko 8 164  evgeny dobrenko keepers. At the beginning of the war, the old institutional forms of propaganda fell into acute crisis. The radical break in the voice of the state led inexorably to profound transformations in all verbal genres—including, naturally, literature. The very forms of the literary process underwent changes, above all in publishing . The principal “thick” literary journals continued to be issued, but overall their output was curtailed: they were sharply reduced in page count, frequency of publication , and print run. In 1941 Molodaia gvardiia, Sibirskie ogni, and Na rubezhe ceased publication. Also shut down, among others, were 30 dnei (1941), Krasnaia nov’ (1942), and Internatsional’naia literatura (1943). Literature migrated predominantly to the pages of newspapers run by the party and the military. These newspapers now published not only reporting and commentary, but also plays, short stories, novels, and poetry —a development that produced a qualitative change in the status of the literary text. An artistic text published in, say, Pravda, served after all as a tool in establishing the direction of the political line. A clear example of this tendency is Aleksandr Korneichuk’s play, Front (The Front). Published in Pravda at the most critical moment of the war, the summer of 1942, this play marked Stalin’s new, tougher approach to the “military cadres.” The conflict between Ognev and Gorlov reflected a change that had occurred at the top of the government. This change was made public through Korneichuk’s play and through its interpretation in a special “critical” editorial in the 29 September 1942 issue of Pravda, “O p’ese Aleksandra Korneichuka Front” (On Aleksandr Korneichuk’s Play The Front). This situation demands a reexamination of literary criticism in the context of a broader concept of “war literature,” one that incorporates the totality of war texts, whose boundaries were effaced during the war years.2 As Ilya Ehrenburg deftly noted in 1944, “the time has come to stop dividing things by heading and category.”3 Indeed, it is a fine line that separates Aleksei Surkov’s verse from Ehrenburg’s journalism . The boundary between that journalism and the lead article from Pravda or Krasnaia zvezda is even blurrier. The line separating such an article from a critical review published in Novyi mir or Oktiabr’ during the war is completely imperceptible. And there simply is no line separating such a review from examples of party criticism written by the Department for Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee (Agitprop) officials. Those lead articles and editorials in Pravda during the first period of World War II that discussed literary works were, as a rule, not really about literature.4 Rather, they were devoted to propagandistic problems, and the utilization of literature in the context of resolving these problems showed that literature had begun to fulfill the mission that had been bestowed upon it: in a Pravda editorial on 26 December 1941 it was argued that in wartime “the work of science, technology, literature and art . . . is needed not less, but...

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