The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

224 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

award and not selected for it was a scandal – although the bard of Yasnaya Polyana would surely not have accepted: he craved repression, not one more award, and the idea of literary honor linked to, and financed by, the discoverer of dynamite could only have struck the pacifist Tolstoy as obscene.) The three “Soviet-based” laureates are Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965, for his war epic The Quiet Don written a quarter-century earlier, 1928–40), and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970). All awards were political. Even Sholokhov, who had served the Stalinist literary establishment impeccably, was known for his intercessions on behalf of writers. In a spectacular speech at the 1956 Twentieth PartyCongress,SholokhovshamedtheUnionthathadnourishedhim,remark-ing on the “huge piles of gray trash” that buried the handful of intelligent books produced over the past several decades – and noting that the Union contained almost four thousand members but this size was deceptive, because among them were so many “dead souls.”

Of Russian Nobel laureates, the most heroic in productivity, longevity, and resistance has been Solzhenitsyn. He will be this chapter’s first, “Tolstoyan” anchor for its survey of the post-Stalinist literary field. Our second and contrasting anchor will be the most “Dostoevskian” of the women prose writers of the next generation, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938). The third section of this chapter, devoted to three younger prose writers of the post-communist period already well established in English translation, makes no attempt at anchoring or synthesis – only at sampling the rich variety out of which a twenty-first-century literary canon will emerge.

The intelligentsia and the camps (Solzhenitsyn)

Solzhenitsyn is a master of several prison-camp genres, each informed by his privileged position as an intellectual reduced to the ranks of the unfree. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962 and a milepost for the new Thaw, was one type of testimony: modest, private, Chekhovian, a single bricklayer’s survival from dawn to dusk. Prisoner Shukhov’s one day is drawn from Solzhenitsyn’s own experience in 1951 in the northern camp of Ekibastuz, a vast complex established exclusively for “politicals.” But the events of the day are filtered through a far simpler mind. Self-pity and bitterness in this pungent oral diary are minimal. Although the canonical prototypeof Siberian hardlabor is Dostoevsky’s life and prison memoirs, a deeper subtext for Ivan Denisovich’s relatively successful day might be Platon Karatayev, prisoner of war, Tolstoy’s ideal of a reconciliation with one’s fate through resourcefulness and simple manual labor.