The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 221

The Thaw that opened out into a meltdown, initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev (in office 1985–91), became famous around the world as glasnost, literally “openness” or “the right to public voice.”

Thaws were erratic and unreliable. At the peak of the first Thaw in 1956, Aleksandr Fadeyev (b. 1901), competent novelist and dutiful head of the Union of Soviet Writers from 1946 to 1954, felt the ice shifting and shot himself. Even before Stalin’s death, writers began to call for “sincerity” and “honesty” in literature (tentatively, timidly, with a pureness of heart that is now hard to believe). These pioneers discovered, to their astonishment, that they were not expelled from the Writers’ Union or arrested for their outspokenness. Since this premiere post-Stalinist Thaw (1954–56) raised issues repeated in later freezings and meltings right up to the final collapse of communism, a brief look at some of its landmarks will help place our exemplary texts and writers.1

This first Thaw was bracketed by two institutional sensations: the Second Congress of Soviet Writers, called in 1954 after a twenty-year hiatus, and the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, where Khrushchev first officially criticized aspects of Stalinist policy, albeit during a secret session. To be sure, neither Congress publicly entertained the possibility that all of communism – or even all“guidancefromabove”–wasa badthing forwriters,any morethanCatherine the Great, satirizing the abuses of her regime from the safety of her imperial court, had entertained the possibility that serfdom should be abolished or that her autocracy should become less absolute. But this semi-official exposure of state crimes emboldened the liberal critics. The gains of this initial Thaw fall into four categories: rehabilitations of repressed writers, renewed contact with the outside world, newly permitted literary heroes and plots, and an internal criticism of socialist realism itself.

Posthumous rehabilitation, which cleared for public mention and re-publication many writers who had been put to death or silenced, could be disorienting. Often no reasons were given for the initial repression, nor for the sudden return of the victims to official life. Names restored to the Russian canon included Babel, Bulgakov, Platonov, Zoshchenko (who had four more years to live), and Meyerhold – although the fates of these artists had varied widely, from mere reprimand by Stalin-era bureaucrats to the most brutal murder. Zamyatin remained under taboo. National pride could at last be openly registered for the fact that Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), friend of Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Gorky and e´migre´ since 1919, had won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933. Also restored to life was Fyodor Dostoevsky. He was not wholly snuffed out during the Stalinera, ofcourse, but unlike the magnificently manipulated and co-opted Tolstoy, Dostoevsky had been under a dark cloud since his massive discrediting by Gorky even before the Revolution. His greatest works