Russian literature. A short introduction

blossoming of the official cult of Stalin. Writers who wanted to be published needed to manifest partiinost’, or fidelity to party values, including (from the late 1930s) the adulation of the leader. In countless poems, stories, and novels, he appeared as the all-seeing friend of every good Soviet citizen:

Late at night, when every sound falls silent, Behind the Kremlin’s grey and ancient towers, The people of all nations’ secret wishes Are entrusted to dear Stalin by the world.

This poem by Aleksandr Surkov is terrible by any standards; but writers of real talent also responded to the Stalin cult. An ‘Ode to Stalin’ by Mandelstam, for instance, is distinguished by its nobility of phrasing and apparent sincerity of feeling.

For many critics belonging to the so-called ‘first wave’ of the emigration (those who left Russia during or soon after the Revolution), the case against Soviet art was settled in advance. According to Vladislav Khodasevich, a formidable literary critic as well as an outstanding poet: ‘Mayakovsky has never been the poet of the revolution, any more than he has ever been a revolutionary poet. His rhetoric is, in fact, the rhetoric of the pogrom, directing violence and invective against anything weak and defenceless, whether that be a German sausage-shop in Moscow or a bourgeois gripped tightly round the throat.’ On its own terms, Khodasevich’s assessment is hard to assail, but the trouble is that few texts produced in post-1917 Russia would satisfy the criterion of unqualified support for those who suffered under Soviet power. Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, a lament for the victims of the Great Purges (the butchery of millions of supposed ‘enemies of the people’ in 1937–8), and implacably hostile to their torturers, was a work of artistic skill dedicated to a morally impeccable purpose. But this was exceptional. Mostly, the talented writers caught in the different waves of repression dealt in various forms of moral