A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond

9. Literary criticism during the thaw

184 Criticism and Literary Policy after Stalin While the beginning of the post-Stalin era is clearly marked as March 1953, its end is less clearly defined. Although the political end of the Thaw was announced by the resolution of the October plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1964 to remove Nikita Khrushchev from power, in many other respects the Thaw continued for another few years, for example in the sphere of economy with the Kosygin reforms and in international relations at least until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. From the point of view of cultural history, the Thaw continued at least until the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in the winter of 1966, an event that marked not only the end of liberalization and social criticism (Daniel was sentenced first and foremost for writing satire), but also delineated the limits of literary criticism (Sinyavsky was known above all as a critic writing for Novyi mir and was sentenced, among other things, for his famous lampoon “Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm” (What Is Socialist Realism). Then there was the Fourth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in the spring of 1967, during which a significant number of the most outstanding writers (more than eighty people) supported Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s call for an end to censorship. And yet, the last instance was Alexander Tvardovsky leaving the post  Literary criticism during the thaw evgeny dobrenko and ilya kalinin 9 literary criticism during the thaw  185 of editor in chief of the journal Novyi mir in February 1970. The defeat of Novyi mir, which had been the center of the liberal intelligentsia, marked the end of the Thaw. In fact, this moment was the beginning of the “epoch of the 1970s,” later called the Era of Stagnation (zastoi) and creeping re-Stalinization. In the field of literature the Thaw, which stood out for previously unseen dynamism , began with literary criticism. Literary criticism established itself during the very first months after Stalin’s death as an important political and ideological factor; even before the publication of Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel Ottepel’ (The Thaw) there had been Olga Berggol’ts article on lyric poetry and Vladimir Pomerantsev’s “Ob iskrennosti v literature” (On Sincerity in Literature), both of which had caused a sensation . Only a year later, Mikhail Lifshits’s pamphlet “Dnevnik Marietty Shaginian” (The Diary of Marietta Shaginyan), Fedor Abramov’s articles about the varnishing in “kolkhoz prose,” and Mark Shcheglov’s reviews were published. After the Second Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in December 1954, the most odious figures in the union (Anatolii Sofronov and Nikolai Gribachev) were forced out. Instead, Konstantin Fedin and Nikolai Tikhonov, who were less compromised, were nominated as leaders. The new rise of liberalization was a result of the events of 1956. In March, straight after the Twentieth Party Congress, the first volume of the almanac Literaturnaia Moskva appeared. In August, Daniil Granin’s short story “Sobstvennoe mnenie” (An Opinion of One’s Own) was published, Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Ne khlebom edinym (Not by Bread Alone) featured in the August–October issues of Novyi mir, and in September Semyon Kirsanov’s poem “Sem’ dnei nedeli” (The Seven Days of the Week) saw the light of day. However, after the events in Hungary at the end of October 1956, these authors and their works increasingly came under attack. Khrushchev’s warning cries during meetings with intellectuals in May 1957 and then in July 1959, as well as in his speech at the Third Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in May 1959, were immediately picked up by the officious critics (Vitalii Ozerov, Vasilii Novikov, and others), who had divided writers into those who were “always with the party, always with the people,” that is, those who had “defended the principles” in 1953–1956 (Vsevolod Kochetov, Aleksei Surkov, Alexander Fadeev, Galina Nikolaeva, Sofronov, Gribachev, Boris Gorbatov, Konstantin Simonov, and Boris Polevoy), and those who “stir up” the situation (Ehrenburg, Dudintsev, Veniamin Kaverin, Granin, Vladimir Tendriakov, Konstantin Paustovsky, Aleksandr Iashin, and Margarita Aliger, among others). The second half of the 1950s saw the birth of two currents that would define Soviet literature in the decades to come, namely village prose and war prose. In late 1958 a campaign against Boris Pasternak began, orchestrated by the government and aimed at his novel Doctor Zhivago, which had won him the Nobel Prize.1 However, the...