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Isaiah Berlin, visiting Moscow in 1945, complained of the “remarkable pall of total inertia” that hung over Soviet writers. Most had been reduced to the confines of prescribed socialist realism, a genre of homily derided as “boy meets tractor”. Bulgakov had died censored in 1940, Pasternak was translating Shakespeare and working on Doctor Zhivago in secret, Mandelstam and Babel had been killed in the purges, lost in the same gulag system as Solzhenitsyn’s fictional Ivan Denisovich. Stalin corralled the liriki (writers and poets) to match the efforts of the fisiki (engineers and architects), to serve the breakneck industrialisation of the 1930s. By the 1940s Soviet literature had collapsed into the banality of paean. Even Akhmatova was reduced to writing poems in praise of Stalin to try and get her son released from the camps. Continue reading →

Socialist Realism, the approach prescribed for writers and artists in Stalin’s Soviet Union, has long been described, usually with a sneer, as neither “socialist” nor “realist”. Western critics then pass on to what they judge to be “real” art – the work of internal dissenters, published in samizdat or smuggled abroad (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky), or of Russian writers from the post-1917 emigration (Bunin). In his acknowledgements, Frank Westerman, the Dutch writer and journalist, makes the point. “In Western reference works,” he complains, “the only literature of lasting value from the USSR is that which was clandestine, banned, confiscated, hand-copied, smuggled to the West or never published at all.” Continue reading →

Yes, I’m the velvet version,

Here is the bad news!