Russian literature. A short introduction

The more reflective writers of the 1930s and 1940s, then, were concerned that under a regime which accorded at best a secondary weight to aesthetic criteria in setting down guidelines for publication, all literary production might turn into graphomania. (That such worries were not necessarily chimerical was illustrated by the case of Olesha himself, who sank into alcohol-fuelled despair and the composition of fissiparous fragments during the mid-1930s.) After Stalin’s death, though, the term ‘graphomania’ acquired a different force, as the prize-winning novels of the Stalin era were examined and found wanting, and Socialist Realism itself came under scrutiny. Though the doctrine officially remained in force until 1991, it was irrelevant to a fair amount of the literature published after 1956, even during the relatively repressive ‘period of stagnation’ (1964–87) which succeeded the ‘Khrushchev thaw’ of 1954–64. The future of Soviet literature was the subject of heated debates, which occasionally reached journals and public meetings, but were more often carried on over kitchen tables. Those who proclaimed the virtues of artistic autonomy, ‘art for art’s sake’, could point to the many solemn, huge, and forgotten novels that littered the artistic landscape like beached whales. The fact that Solzhenitsyn’s novels and stories of the 1950s and early 1960s were preceded by the publication of fulminating articles about parish-pump problems in provincial newspapers, and followed by the composition of yet more polemic, lent fuel to accusations that Solzhenitsyn was a kind of latter-day Pyotr Boborykin or Aleksandr Amfiteatrov (two prolific and long-forgotten late nineteenth-century authors of topical fiction). But it was equally possible for advocates of writing’s moral purpose to refer to the cases of the early twentieth-century avant-garde writers Aleksey Kruchonykh and David Burlyuk, whose repetitive output mechanically reproduced futurist devices long after the creative power of these had become exhausted. In Andrey Sinyavsky’s 1960 story ‘Graphomaniacs’, some of the characters were passionately committed to writing in alternative genres – extremely badly; but the story’s narrator, Galkin, a ‘graphomaniac’ of the officially approved kind, and operating a sort of Socialist Realist ‘writing by numbers’, seemed at least equally ludicrious.