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250 Literary Criticism at the Soviet Epoch’s End At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986, which, as it turned out, was the ruling party’s penultimate, Mikhail Gorbachev, elected general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPUSSR a year ago, raised the question of broadening the policy of glasnost.The task of bringing about a “genuine revolution in consciousness ” in the name of “creating a new life,” which the general secretary would proclaim in one and a half year’s time, was to a large degree entrusted to journal essays and literary criticism.1 These genres were destined to become important instruments for the reappraisal of Soviet history, the cultural legacy, and the entire complex of ideas about literature and its place in society. Just like during the Thaw, the literary intelligentsia was to become an active force of renewal in society. However, only a few years later literary criticism would fall out of “great time” (Bakhtin) and become a marginal and hardly visible phenomenon in public life. The process of decentralization and commercializing culture triggered feelings of disappointment and defeatism in most critics, as well as a tendency toward self-isolation, regardless of the ideological camp to which they belonged. Most of them turned out to be incapable of reacting to the changes in the cultural situation by elaborating new criteria for the description and appraisal of culture.  Literary criticism and the end of the soviet system, 1985–1991 birgit menzel and boris dubin 12 literary criticism and the end of the soviet system, 1985–1991  251 What does the role of literary criticism at the end of the Soviet epoch look like in retrospective? Was its marginalization caused by an internal crisis, at least partly? Would it not be appropriate to regard the depreciation of the role of literary criticism as a sign that the cultural system was normalizing and developing a functional differentiation similar to the one that can be seen in developed Western countries? The Change in the Social Context of Literary Criticism The reading public’s demand for diverse information about the country’s past, as well as for the literature that had been banned for decades, led to a gradual abolition of the institution of censorship as a means of totalitarian control of culture. A law that abolished censorship in the print and other mass media came into force in the USSR on 12 June 1990, but the process of the liberation of culture, art and literature, and literary criticism had begun already in the second half of 1986. The intelligentsia , which supported the reforms, was inspired by the hope to build a “socialism with a human face,” a hope that had first surfaced during the Khrushchev Thaw a few decades earlier, to realize the utopias of the 1920s, and to see the triumph of the moral values of the classics and of unofficial literature, which was finally no longer suppressed. In July 1986 Elem Klimov was elected chairman of the Filmmakers’ Union. Subsequently the so-called shelved films (polochnoe kino), not released for the general audience in their time, found their way onto the country’s screens. In the fall of the same year writers from the generation of the “men of the sixties” (shestidesiatniki) were elected to head the editorial boards of a number of leading journals: Sergei Zalygin became editor in chief of Novyi mir, Grigorii Baklanov of Znamia, and Vitalii Korotich of Ogonek. In spring 1986 Ogonek published a number of poems by Nikolai Gumilyov, a poet whose work had hitherto been taboo. In the new novels of Chingiz Aitmatov (Plakha [The Block; translated into English as The Place of the Skull]), Viktor Astafiev (Pechal’nyi detektiv [A Sad Detective Novel]), and Valentin Rasputin (Pozhar [The Conflagration]) religious themes were no longer accompanied by atheist propaganda, while many pressing topics were treated with a hitherto impossible degree of frankness. Previously banned works from the Stalinist era (for example Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur), by the authors of the first wave of emigration (such as Vladimir Nabokov and Vladislav Khodasevich) and also anti-Soviet texts by Soviet authors that had been written “for the desk drawer” (v stol), such as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Belye odezhdy (White Garments) and Alexander Tvardovsky’s Po pravu pamiati (By the Right of Memory), were now published. Literary interactions were subject to significant changes. The “thick” literary journals, which featured sections for journalistic essays and published literary works previously...

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