Russian literature: Encyclopedia II - Russian literature - Soviet era

Russian literature - Soviet era

Sovietization of Russia affected literature after 1917. Maxim Gorky, Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov, Valentin Kataev, Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ilf and Petrov came to prominence as part of Soviet literature. Whilst Socialist realism gained official support in the Soviet Union, some of the writers -- such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Platonov, Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel and Vasily Grossman -- secretly continued the classical tradition of Russian literature, writing "under the table", with no hope of publishing such works until after their deaths. The Serapion Brothers insisted on the right to create a literature independent of political ideology: this brought them into conflict with the government. Nor did the authorities tolerate the experimental art of the Oberiuts. Meanwhile, émigré writers such as Nobel Prize winner Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin, Alexander Kuprin, Andrey Bely, Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Nabokov continued to flourish in exile.

In post-Stalin Russia Socialist realism remained the only permitted style; writers like Nobel Prize winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (who built his works on the legacy of the gulag camps) or Venedikt Erofeev continued the tradition of clandestine literature. Post-Communist Russia saw most of these works published and become a part of mainstream culture. However, even before the decay of the Soviet Union, tolerance to non-mainstream art had slowly started to grow, especially during the Khrushchev Thaw. Some works of Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov were published in the 1960s. Social criticism, as in the science fiction of the Strugatsky brothers and the literature of the Mitkis became popular. As another post-Stalin development, bard poetry developed.

In the late Soviet era émigré authors like Nobel prize winner Joseph Brodsky and short story writer Sergei Dovlatov became successful in the West, but remained known in the Soviet Union only in samizdat.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Soviet era", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki