Russian literature. A short introduction

could say it to no-one’, in the words of a poem from Joseph Brodsky’s cycle ‘A Part of Speech’.

In the post-Stalin era, then, the concept of writers as ‘masters of minds’, compromised by Socialist Realism, was the source of serious doubt among many intelligent commentators on, and practitioners of, literature. These included not only Shalamov, recognized by Viktor Erofeev as a ‘literary’ writer, but also the supposedly ‘teleological’ Solzhenitsyn. With emerging doubts that the writer’s function was or should be purely didactic went a decline in the standing of the novel, the genre most privileged under high Stalinism precisely because of its supposed capacity for weighty moral commentary. (A cartoon published in the humorous magazine Krokodil in 1952 showed two writers talking. Writer A to Writer B: ‘I’ve just thought of a great subject for a little short story!’. Writer B: ‘Well, get down and write it, then!’. Writer A: ‘No, you see the problem is I can’t think of how to turn it into a big novel!’.) (Ill. 14.)

However, the compromised standing of moral disquisitions on the one hand, and the novel on the other, was not well understood in the West during the post-Stalin years. Here, many readers looked to Russian writers for the direct and unironic discussion of ethical matters that had become unfashionable in the West after the Second World War. To many commentators in the late 1950s, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) seemed a much weightier novel than any recent publication in the English language, while Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich spoke with an authority recalling Dostoevsky’s memoir of prison-camp life House of the Dead (1861–2). If Nabokov wished that Tolstoy had exercised his concentration entirely on the free-floating curl hanging down at the back of Anna Karenina’s head, many readers, since Anna Karenina was published, have been more absorbed by the novel’s governing moral themes: whether personal happiness is legitimate at the cost of imposing suffering on others, or whether there may be such a thing as inescapable or deserved suffering. And they have expected