Russian literature. A short introduction

the devices of traditional Russian folklore on the one hand and classical epic on the other. More recently, other critics, such as David Shepherd, Thomas Lahusen, and Jochen Hellbeck, have analysed the active process of self-shaping undergone by Socialist Realist writers themselves, as they struggled, in private diaries as well as public statements, to mould themselves in the manner required by Party dictates, repeatedly rewriting early versions of their works in order to make them conform with changes in policy. Processes of this kind may not suit Western ideals of artistic and ethical independence, but they were in no sense unambiguous and easy to interpret: one central tragedy of the Stalinist era, indeed, was the amount of complex thought and agonized intelligence that went into producing the simple-minded propaganda novels and poems required by Party policy.

Whichever way, the view of the writer as ‘master of minds’ was a constant of Russian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even so studiedly ironic a Modernist as Vladimir Nabokov was happy to assert that he was no ‘frivolous firebird’, but ‘a moralist kicking sin, scoffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride’. Dissent crystallized round the manner in which ethical or aesthetic edification was to be imparted, and the material that it should impart, rather than the question of whether such edification might be tolerated in the first place. The author’s right and duty to give such edification was a central plank of Soviet literary culture, in which officially approved authors not only enjoyed material privileges, but were also treated as experts on topical issues of the day. (A typically grotesque example of this was the participation of the prominent Soviet poet Pavel Antokolsky, then in his sixties, in a debate about ‘the youth of today’ that ran in the Young Communist League newspaper Komsomol’skaya pravda during late 1963 and early 1964.) The official view of writers as ‘tutors to the masses’ did not mean that this role was eschewed by those opposed to the regime. As memoirs and letters make clear, marginal or persecuted writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky were credited with peculiar