The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Chapter 9

Coming to terms and seeking new terms: from the first Thaw (1956) to the end of the millennium

1953: Death of Stalin

1954: Thaw: Second Congress of Union of Soviet Writers

1956: 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev’s “secret speech” on Stalin’s crimes

1956: Rebellions in Hungary and Poland against Soviet rule

1958: Freeze: Pasternak awarded the Nobel Prize (and is required to

renounce it) 1961: Thaw: Stalin’s body removed from mausoleum on Red Square 1963–66: Freeze: Arrests of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Yuly Daniel

(1966) 1968: Brezhnev orders invasion of Czechoslovakia to end “Prague Spring” 1970: Solzhenitsyn awarded the Nobel Prize (and accepts it) 1973: Solzhenitsyn deported from USSR 1987: Glasnost (open-ended thaw) begun by Mikhail Gorbachev 1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall 1991: Putsch against Gorbachev fails; abolition of state censorship; Yeltsin

becomes president 1994: Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia 2004: B. Akunin’s detective novels pass the 8 million mark in Russian sales

The first half of the twentieth century in Russian literature can be surveyed in terms of its successive doctrines: Symbolism, Futurism, Acmeism, socialist realism. The second half has conventionally been linked with changes in temperature. The journalist and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) provided the impetus for the “seasonal” metaphor with his minor but immensely influential post-Stalinist novella, The Thaw (1954). The image is reassuring. A thaw [ottepeV] suggests that culture has not wholly died out nor lost touch with its past - however frozen, exhausted, or lifeless the surface might appear. Spores hide latent under the ice and snow, ready to be warmed back to life as soon as another cycle begins. A lengthy period between a freeze and a thaw, when die-off is not cataclysmic but prohibitions and taboos proliferate (as under Leonid Brezhnev, in office 1964-82), came to be known as a “stagnation” [zastoi].

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