The Zones of Late Socialist Literature

15
The Zones of Late Socialist Literature

polly jones
The late socialist period across almost all of the Eastern bloc (except Romania
and Albania) was unique for the coexistence and competition of three publish-
ing industries: officially published literature, or gosizdat; samizdat, or literature
printed or hand-typed, and distributed domestically outside official publishing
because its style or content contradicted Socialist Realism; and tamizdat, texts
by residents of socialist countries but first published outside the Eastern bloc,
again usually because they flouted state doctrine.1 All three types of publishing
existed before the 1960s: Russian samizdat could trace its roots far back before
the revolution, tamizdat scandals had occasionally erupted earlier in Soviet
history, and socialist literature had already been firmly institutionalized, into its
third decade on the Western fringes of the bloc and approaching its half-
century in the Soviet Union. Throughout the late socialist period, the volume
of samizdat and tamizdat never threatened to exceed the vast print runs and
powerful publicity machine of gosizdat. Yet never before had socialist literature
faced such competition for readers and critical prestige, and never had writers
been faced with a genuine, if risky, choice of multiple “zones” through which
to reach readers. The effects of this new publishing diversity were profound in
terms of socialist literary institutions, identities and policies.
In the 1960s and 1970s, samizdat and tamizdat literature grew exponentially,
producing what many Western and dissident observers saw as a gravitational
shift from official literature to unofficial literature and a profound schism
between these two worlds: The most politically daring, philosophically pro-
found and aesthetically sophisticated works of East European fiction seemed
now to appear in unofficial publications.2 Yet others noted that the socialist
1 For a succinct outline, see D. Pospielovsky, “From ‘Gosizdat’ to ‘Samizdat’ and

‘Tamizdat,’” Canadian Slavonic Papers 20, 1 (Mar. 1978), 44–62.
2 E.g. ibid.; Yurii Malʹtsev, Volʹnaia russkaia literatura, 1955–1975 (Frankfurt am Main: Posev,
1976); Abram Terts, “Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii,” Kontinent 1 (1974), 143–90.
376
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Australian Catholic University, on 28 Oct 2017 at 14:55:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316471821.016
literary world had itself become more difficult to map, with works at its fringes
and margins sharing some features with illicit publications: aesthetic experi-
mentation, social, moral and political critique, and psychologically and ethi-
cally complex heroes. Such “grey zones” and “in-between literature” blurred
the frontiers between official and unofficial publishing and thrived in many
parts of the bloc, especially Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, the
main focus of this chapter.3
Late socialist culture is often mapped in complex spatial terms: the pluraliza-
tion of the underground(s); living “outside” Soviet norms; “de-territorializing”
ideology in public spaces; the existence of “oases” and “niches” of relative
autonomy within intellectual life.4 Yet literature, perhaps because it is so
closely linked to personal freedom and (perhaps especially in Eastern
Europe) imbued with a sense of moral mission, has often seemed to entail
starker territorial divisions: crossing the “frontier” into samizdat and tamizdat;
working either above or under ground; the impossibility of bridging two
literary “worlds,” one free, the other compromised aesthetically and
morally.5 Similarly, post-Stalinist writers’ behavior has often been categorized
into fixed “roles,” from craven conformity to outright dissidence.6
In fact, though, such definitive choices of publishing outlets and literary
identities were far from typical in late socialism. Indeed, the most strident
claims about the stark divisions between official and unofficial literatures (and
their associated behaviors) often issued from writers and critics who had
already definitively moved into the underground, and were urging more of
their colleagues and readers to do the same. However, such certainty eluded
3 E.g. Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism: Soviet Fiction Since Ivan Denisovich
(London: Granada Publishing, 1980); Deming Brown, The Last Years of Soviet Russian
Literature: Prose Fiction, 1975–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Nicholas Shneidman, Soviet Literature in the 1970s: Artistic Diversity and Ideological
Conformity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Dennis C. Beck, “Gray Zone
Theatre Dissidence: Rethinking Revolution Through the Enactment of Civil Society,”
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 23, 2 (Spring 2009), 89–109; Jiří Holý, Writers
Under Siege: Czech Literature Since 1945 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008).
4 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children:
The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2009); Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle, Brezhnev Reconsidered (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
5 E.g. Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism (New York: Basic
Books, 1988); Yurii Malʹtsev, “Promezhutochnaia literatura i kriterii podlinnosti,”
Kontinent 25 (1980), 285–321, who claims that “authenticity” is absent from all officially
published texts.
6 E.g. George Roseme, “The Politics of Soviet Literature,” in John Strong (ed.), The Soviet
Union Under Brezhnev and Kosygin (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), 176–92;
Natalia Ivanova, “Nostal’iashchee,” Znamia 9 (1997).
377
polly jones
many of their contemporaries. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, as this
chapter will argue, writers continued to move between these worlds, stretch-
ing their limits through protest against socialist institutions and literary
controls, as well as through their literary texts. Indeed, the exact definition
and aims of socialist literature had become somewhat unclear to officials,
shaken by the ructions of the Thaw and influenced by the greater ideological
pragmatism of developed socialism. Many writers’ journeys into unofficial
publishing were therefore prolonged, by their own uncertainties and by the
inconsistent cultural policies of the authorities as they juggled concerns about
rigor, readability, rival media and regime reputation. Some authors even-
tually journeyed further, out of the Eastern bloc and into yet another world:
that of émigré publishing, with its links to Western anti-communism.
The Emergence of New Zones

in the 1950s and 1960s
Socialist Realism, the official state aesthetic doctrine, was inextricably inter-
twined with Stalinism. It was ratified between 1932 and 1934 and was there-
after enforced through a characteristically Stalinist blend of repression with
selective cooptation of older traditions and unorthodox authors and texts. Its
core principle of depicting “reality in its revolutionary development” dictated
optimism, celebration and emplotment of historical progress, not just in
literature but in Soviet life. Literature projected the communist future
while expressing the deepest urges of the Stalinist present: the desire to
speed up progress toward communism; the realization of utopia; and the
aestheticization of everyday life.7 This doctrine was enforced especially
stringently in the postwar Soviet Union, which was also when it was exported
to the newly Sovietized Eastern bloc.
After Stalin’s death, socialist cultures across Eastern Europe enjoyed
“Thaws” of different temperatures and duration; late socialist literary institu-
tions were crucially shaped by leaders’ and writers’ reactions to these Thaws
and to their curtailment, completed by 1970 (and in some places much
earlier). While the end of Stalinism had almost immediate effects in the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Poland, for example, the region
was more profoundly affected by Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of
1956, which opened up myriad questions of central importance to the arts,
7 Yevgenii Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007); Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981).
378
including professional autonomy, freedom to criticize and doctrinal diversity.

In Poland and Hungary, in particular, it was writers who were at the forefront
of these discussions and quickly pushed them beyond permissible limits.
Fears of a Soviet Petofi Circle in turn drove the Soviet authorities to clamp
down on the intelligentsia within months of the speech.8 The threat posed
by such literary and intellectual ferment curtailed fledgling attempts to
revitalize and diversify socialist literature before they could bear much
fruit. The later 1950s saw scant reform of socialist literary institutions and
even at times seemed to herald a return to Stalinist persecution of writers,
such as Boris Pasternak, forced to renounce the Nobel Prize and hounded by
the Soviet authorities for tamizdat publication of Doctor Zhivago until his
death in 1960.
However, the early 1960s saw renewed attempts to reform socialism and
discard Stalinism, heralding new hope among the socialist intelligentsia.
The Soviet Thaw was one of the shortest of the decade. Initiated by
Khrushchev’s return to de-Stalinization at the end of 1961, and spearheaded
by the liberal literary journal Novyi mir, it peaked with publication of
Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and was already
being constrained by the Soviet authorities before Khrushchev’s ouster
(1964). Even this “warmest” Soviet Thaw periodically froze over; when
Vasilii Grossman submitted his epic historical novel Life and Fate to the
journal Znamia in the early 1960s, both the editor and the party’s ideological
chief proclaimed it dangerously anti-Soviet and moved swiftly to destroy it,
probably hastening the author’s death. The first years of Leonid Brezhnev’s
leadership were characterized by uncertainty about state–intelligentsia rela-
tions in the new regime, gradually giving way to greater foreboding.
In Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the most important Thaw got underway in
1963 and peaked in 1967–68, with the lifting of censorship, the flourishing of
extensive literary experimentation and critique (such as prison narratives and
experimental youth prose) and the prominent involvement of writers and
intellectuals in the Prague Spring. The latter were brought back under
control only in early 1970. In Poland and Hungary, meanwhile, greater
regime stability and greater awareness since the 1950s of the potentially
catastrophic effects of liberalization meant that the transition from “Thaw”
to late socialist “normalization” was smoother.
8 Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union,
1953–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). The Petofi Circle was a Hungarian
literary group that played a central role in the revolution of 1956.
379
polly jones
The end of these Thaws of the 1960s – and with it, the dashing of hopes for
a transformation of socialist literature and the socialist writer – was marked not
just by the tightening of literary controls, but also by the growth of new literary
institutions. In the Soviet Union, samizdat manuscripts had started to proliferate
in reaction to the curtailment of the first Thaw, when harsh repressions against
intellectuals in 1956–57 and the quashing of unofficial poetry readings had
spurred writers to circulate documentation of these repressions, and then to
found the first samizdat journals, such as Sintaksis, at the start of the 1960s.
The first signals of Brezhnev’s otherwise deliberately vague cultural policy were
sent through repression of unofficial publishing, before most writers had
seriously engaged in it. The landmark events signaling the end of the Thaw
were the 1966 trial of Andrei Siniavskii and Yulii Daniel, for tamizdat publication
of “anti-Soviet” works of literature and criticism, and the trial of Yurii Galanskov
and Aleksandr Ginzburg in 1968, in part for samizdat offenses (these trials
provoked political samizdat, such as the Chronicle of Current Events, to develop
into a key forum for trial reportage). Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from Soviet
literature in 1968–69 was punishment for the entwined sins of tamizdat, samiz-
dat and political dissent, erasing memories of his brief but spectacular period of
Soviet publication and acclaim earlier in the decade. The attacks on Novyi mir in
1969–70 only confirmed the new limits to Soviet literature and left many
convinced that all outlets for Soviet publication had been closed.
In Czechoslovakia, the curtailment of the Prague Spring orchestrated around
the same time as this final act of the Soviet “freeze” was more demonstrative,
since the political involvement and radicalism of writers had been so much
greater. Unlike the isolated Soviet signals of intolerance for literary disobe-
dience, the Czechoslovak leadership orchestrated a massive purge of writers
and literary institutions in 1969–70, expelling hundreds of writers, banning them
from publication, and shutting down all literary journals. The latitude for official
publications thus seemed tiny at the start of 1970, and there quickly sprang up
samizdat journals and, later, samizdat publishing houses, such as Petlice and
later Kvart. These would produce editions more professional and durable than
anything circulated in Soviet samizdat (though the Czechoslovak network was
on a much smaller scale than later Polish samizdat). By contrast, in Hungary, the
initial transition to late socialism was marked by fewer demonstrative acts of
repression, and by the affirmation of a certain tolerance for criticism (or “para-
opposition”) in official publications.9 Samizdat here was much more limited as
9 George Schopflin, “Opposition and Para-Opposition: Critical Currents in Hungary,

1968–1978,” in R. L. Tokes (ed.), Opposition in Eastern Europe (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1979), 142–86.
380
a result, with limited circulation more typical for works that sailed close to
official limits, such as the Gulag narrative of Jozsef Lengyel (Confrontation) and
the bleak social portraiture of his fellow Hungarian, Gyŏrgy Konrád (The Case
Worker).
The “socialist Sixties” across the bloc were therefore varied in their
intensity and duration, and in the repression used to end them and signal
the dawn of a new era.10 However, what followed the end of these Thaws
was less diverse, the leaders of the bloc more unified (as they were militarily
by the Brezhnev doctrine) in their desire to forestall another Prague Spring
and catastrophic reverberations across the region. Normalization under János
Kádár and Gustáv Husák, and “stability of cadres” and “developed socialism”
under Brezhnev, all bespoke a desire to abandon hectic reforms while
stemming any overt dissent before it could spread, as it had in 1968; writers
and artists were viewed as a particular threat in this regard.
These policies could seem impossibly restrictive, making unofficial pub-
lishing the only viable option; the Soviet satirist Vladimir Voinovich observed
that such restrictions were far more onerous for talented writers than for
mediocre ones.11 Conversely, though, they could be embraced or at least
exploited, especially where the authorities sought to entice intellectuals to
stay within, or reenter, official culture. The range of publishing outlets from
which writers could choose – and they were diverse, as explored below – was
now wider than ever before. Unofficial publishing had gained momentum
and purpose from the curtailment of the limited liberalization of the 1960s,
and would continue to grow and diversify throughout late socialism, but this
growth saw persistent contestation over its borders, and further intersections
with socialist literature.
Entering and Leaving Samizdat and Tamizdat

Despite the rapid rise of samizdat and tamizdat in the late 1960s, the dawn of
late socialism was notable for writers’ (and indeed theater directors’ and
musicians’) attempts to expand, or at least not to shrink, the limits of socialist
culture. Memories of the recent prestige and prominence of literature in the
Thaw (its frustrations rapidly forgotten) fueled a desire to keep literature
socially relevant and aesthetically innovative, and to keep open the channels
10 Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in
the Second World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
11 Olga Matich and Michael Henry Heim, The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration
(Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1984), 48.
381
polly jones
to as wide a public as possible. Many writers therefore had little desire to

retreat fully into unofficial zones and instead petitioned the authorities in the
late 1960s not to narrow the sphere of official publishing any further. These
petitions were more collective and confident than letters that writers, such as
Mikhail Bulgakov and Yevgenii Zamiatin, had dared to send to Stalin in the
1930s; they reflected the renaissance of the intelligentsia’s sense of its identity
and ideals in the Thaw, and the diminished fears of persecution during this
“vegetarian,” post-terror phase of cultural policy.
Collective writer protests greeted the Siniavskii–Daniel trial and the per-
secution of Solzhenitsyn, for instance, while the tightening of censorship
occasioned a flurry of criticisms around the Third Writers’ Union Congress in
1967, led by Solzhenitsyn but embraced by an eclectic range of writers
including Georgii Vladimov and Vladimir Voinovich. More broadly political
concerns also animated the liberal wing of the Soviet literary profession:
In the late 1960s, writers including Solzhenitsyn, Lidiia Chukovskaia and Roy
Medvedev wrote to the authorities to condemn censorship, stealthy bans on
publication and a growing ideological conservatism for stifling public expres-
sion, fostering the spread of “lies” in official media, and fueling the growth of
alternative publication outlets.12 These protests, straddling aesthetic, social,
political and moral concerns, were the closest equivalent to the writer Ludvík
Vaculík’s “Two Thousand Words” manifesto of 1968, which warned of the
dawning of a more repressive era under a new Czechoslovak leadership.13
Such open (if not exactly public) protest expressed writers’ desire to continue
the civic mission of the Thaw. Though these hopes were dashed, they
nevertheless constituted the first signs of the emergence of a “parallel”
or second public sphere in Eastern Europe, one more rooted in unofficial
publishing and private socializing than ever before.
Despite the increasingly bleak outlook, the majority of writers of the
period still sought publication in official venues rather than in the fledgling
networks of samizdat and tamizdat. Indeed, late 1960s Soviet petitions against
censorship and ideological dogmatism were often inspired by evidence of
unexplained decisions to publish texts that would have seemed socialist
(realist) only a few years earlier. This period represented the peak of unwill-
ing migration of works into samizdat and/or tamizdat after prolonged
attempts at official publication, as editors operated heightened “vigilance”
12 Leopold Labedz (ed.), Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (Harmondsworth, UK:

Penguin Books, 1972).
13 “Two Thousand Words,”in Jaromír Navrá til (ed.), The Prague Spring 1968: A National
Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998).
382
for lingering signs of the Thaw agenda and for contamination from the
nearby Prague Spring. Among these thwarted authors in the Soviet Union
were writers as diverse as Solzhenitsyn (Cancer Ward), Aleksandr Bek (The
New Appointment), Aleksandr Tvardovskii (By Right of Memory), Konstantin
Simonov (100 Days of War) and Vladimir Voinovich (Chonkin). The delays
surrounding such texts meant that their manuscripts often started to circulate
widely as samizdat, or appeared in tamizdat, even before the final decision on
publication was reached, as happened with several of Solzhenitsyn’s novels,
for example.
However, this flux between the three types of publishing was not
a purely transitional phenomenon. In the 1970s, too, writers often published
in both official and unofficial outlets, because of failed publication attempts,
but also due to their increasingly confident sense of what was suitable for
each outlet, and of the ways in which the different “zones” of literature
could be played off against one another to keep writers’ identities unstable
and to prolong their official (and more lucrative) publication careers. For
example, Vasilii Aksenov continued to publish his works sporadically in
Soviet outlets almost to the end of the 1970s, but his main project of the
decade was the experimental novel about the intelligentsia and the Gulag,
The Burn, which circulated in samizdat and tamizdat. Aksenov’s contem-
poraries Anatolii Gladilin, Georgii Vladimov and Vladimir Voinovich like-
wise shifted back and forth between official and unofficial publishing for
much of the 1970s. Writing for mainstream Soviet publications was a way to
squeak their more marginal literary works into print and also helped to
shield them from the harshest punishment for unofficial publishing (as well
as from penury), at least until the authorities realized the extent of their
underground activities.
Others stayed at the margins. Perhaps the most widely disseminated “grey-
zone” literature across the Eastern bloc was guitar poetry; the later rise of
rock music in the 1970s and 1980s, which competed with guitar poetry but
never eclipsed it, was a more clearly underground phenomenon. Drawing on
the traditions of prison songs and lyric romance, influenced by Western folk
music and rejecting the bombastic tone of Soviet mass song, the guitar songs
of Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotskii and Aleksandr Galich – and of
countless less famous socialist “bards” – became the ubiquitous soundtrack
to apartment parties and “wild tourism” in the 1960s and 1970s. The technol-
ogy for copying songs on to cassettes (magnitizdat) was more widespread and
harder to police than the typewriters of samizdat. The often minor-key
music, amateur recording techniques and intimate lyrics of guitar poetry
383
polly jones
were all key to its success, creating a sense of authentic performance and
communication.14
Of the three most famous Soviet bards, Okudzhava’s publishing career was
the most hybrid, his historical novels (see below) published in large print runs
in the 1970s, but his guitar poetry at best tolerated and at worst banned for its
preoccupation with marginal identities and un-Soviet emotions. Vladimir
Vysotskii never received official recognition, despite being the biggest bard
celebrity of all, his rough, passionate style of delivery as important to the cult
around him as his confessional, sometimes allegorical lyrics. He was never
fully defined as mainstream or dissident, yet survived on the margins of
official culture (including work at the liberal edge of Soviet theater, the
Taganka) for a remarkably long period until his death in 1980. Aleksandr
Galich, meanwhile, illustrates that guitar poetry in its more politicized form
could not endure on the margins. Instead, his caustic songs about Stalinism
and Soviet hypocrisy led inexorably to performance bans by the end of the
1960s, exclusive use of samizdat and magnitizdat for song distribution and, by
1974, emigration (he died the same year).
Some writers, of course, wrote exclusively for samizdat, having given up
entirely on official outlets by or even before the dawn of late socialism.
Ludvík Vaculík found that publication of his works was possible only when
socialism (and socialist literature) had been pushed to the limit: During the
Prague Spring, his novel The Axe (1967) caused a sensation with its frank
depiction of a journalist persecuted for attempting to report a suicide. That
same year, he was expelled from the party, and the end of the Prague Spring
then stoked his political activism while pushing his literary works defini-
tively underground. His novel The Guinea Pigs (1970) started his career in
samizdat (and initiated the Petlice publishing initiative) with a deeply
sinister and suggestive meditation on cruelty and corruption. By the end
of the 1970s, he had become so steeped in the culture of the Czechoslovak
underground that he published a samizdat novel, The Dream Book, drama-
tizing samizdat and dissent. A similar trajectory from short-lived socialist
publication to a total embrace of unofficial culture can be traced in the
career of Vaculík’s contemporary and frequent collaborator, Václav Havel.
Their rapid move into samizdat went hand in hand, in the 1970s, with the
evolution of the authors’ position on “dissent” and the “parallel polis,”
14 Martin Daughtry, “‘Sonic Samizdat’: Situating Unofficial Recording in the Post-Stalinist

Soviet Union,” Poetics Today 30, 1 (2009), 27–65; Rachel S. Platonov, Singing the Self:
Guitar Poetry, Community, and Identity in the Post-Stalin Period (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2012).
384
culminating in the drafting of the Charter 77 petition and other seminal

texts on dissent.15
In the Soviet Union, thanks to the longer and more tortuous development
of cultural politics, there were fewer artists with such a clear-cut identifica-
tion with unofficial culture. The author Venedikt Yerofeev was unusual, not
only in exclusively publishing in samizdat, but also in viewing it as a way of
“dropping out” from both socialism and politicization; his Moscow to the End of
the Line (1969–70) was hailed for its carnivalesque irreverence, its sprawling,
inebriated anecdotes and its ingenious and erudite intertextuality, represent-
ing a summation of intelligentsia underground culture. Its appearance in
samizdat, its pages fragile and typesetting unprofessional, enhanced the sense
of an authentic voice emerging entirely outside official publishing.16
However, others used samizdat and tamizdat to pursue more politicized
agendas, exhibiting crossover with nonliterary samizdat such as the Chronicle
of Current Events. Illustrative is Siniavskii (also known as Abram Tertz), whose
trial and Gulag imprisonment were major preoccupations of political samiz-
dat, and whose texts (ranging from polyphonic Gulag narratives to irreverent
studies of Pushkin) appeared in literary samizdat and tamizdat throughout
the 1970s and 1980s. Other politicized literary samizdat and tamizdat, by
Solzhenitsyn, Mark Popovskii and Vladimir Maksimov, often displayed
a peculiar fascination with Stalinism, one of the most taboo subjects of the
1970s and early 1980s and also one of the earliest themes to migrate into
samizdat. Even writers who stayed in the Soviet fold for much longer than
Solzhenitsyn had to use samizdat for their works on the topic. Georgii
Vladimov’s narrative of the Khrushchev-era Gulag closures, Faithful Ruslan,
was told through the perspective of a loyal dog unable to adapt to life without
“The Service,” and represented not just one of the earliest samizdat works of
Gulag fiction, circulating from 1964 onward, but also one of the most
narratively inventive.
It is no surprise that far more politicized authors than Vladimov, such as
Solzhenitsyn and Popovskii, intersected frequently with the dissident move-
ment and political samizdat, nor that they were forced into emigration rather
quickly (unlike their Czechoslovak counterparts). This political strand of samiz-
dat has been criticized for generating not an alternative, but a mirror image, to
socialist literature, retaining its politicized perspective and didacticism; what was
15 Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech
Culture Under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
16 Ann Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” Slavic Review 63, 3
(Autumn 2004), 597–618.
385
polly jones
needed, some argued, was a literature “outside” Soviet concerns (vnesovetskaia),

rather than still fundamentally preoccupied with them.17 Such politicization also
meant that aesthetic experimentation was more limited, especially in prose
works, though samizdat became the major forum for poetic innovation in the
1960s and 1970s. However, by the end of the 1970s, Soviet samizdat had matured
(albeit under constant official pressure) to the point of generating a startlingly
eclectic and confident body of prose and poetry, the Metropol’ almanac.
Compiled by a small team of writers including Vasilii Aksenov and Viktor
Yerofeev in 1978, it brought together a deliberately broad range of writers and
texts to give an “explicit, though far from exhaustive sense of the bottomless
stratum of literature” now being rejected by Soviet publications, which had
come to “form a kind of entire forbidden layer of national literature.”18 Through
this “festive” celebration of the variety and breadth of this reluctantly unofficial
literature, ranging from the songs of Vysotskii to the lyric poetry of Yevgenii
Rein and the obscene stories of Yuz Aleshkovskii, the almanac evoked its
impoverished opposite: the world of official literature, whose taboos by now
stretched from Stalinism to sex, and where stylistic “formalism” of any kind was
frowned upon.
In a similar spirit to the purportedly open petitions of the late 1960s, the
almanac sought public dissemination, but was quickly suppressed by the
KGB. However, even this open provocation evoked a somewhat uncertain
response rather than blatant repression, targeting primarily junior partici-
pants through internal Writers’ Union processes, which backfired with the
refusal of famous authors, such as Aksenov, to stay within the union if the
punishment went ahead. For Aksenov, the episode was the final twist in
his long journey toward emigration, and he left months later, as did
Aleshkovskii. While some participants, such as Fazil’ Iskander, eventually
salvaged a Soviet career, many other participants, such as Viktor Yerofeev,
never again attempted to cross from samizdat to Soviet publication.
Policing the Zones of Literature

As the Metropol’ episode demonstrates, mature socialism was a time when
cultural controls had matured, especially in the Soviet Union, but they had
also mushroomed, duplicating or contradicting each other. Writers and
editors were sometimes able to exploit this bureaucratic complexity to play
17 Matich and Heim, Third Wave, 32.

18 Vasilii Aksenov and Viktor Yerofeev, Metropol’. Literaturnyi alʹmanakh (Moscow:
Podkova, 1999).
386
institutions off against each other using the “telephone politics” of the period,
but official literature was an oppressive and agonizingly unpredictable
world.19 Among the many instruments of control accumulated by this
point were policing and surveillance, well-established bureaucratic bodies
(such as the Writers’ Union and the party’s Department of Culture) and
longstanding censorship (Glavlit, in the Soviet Union).20 The ex cathedra
judgements of leaders on writers and texts, characteristic of the Stalin and
Khrushchev eras, were now largely supplanted by more anonymized,
bureaucratized decision-making.
The least powerful of these bodies was now the censorship, increasingly
viewed as fact-checkers rather than highly qualified analysts, whose decisions
could be overruled. Nonetheless, the censors shored up their position some-
what through cooperation with the military (which banned several “pessi-
mistic” works about war) and Soviet ministries (such as the metal industry
bosses who helped to ban Bek’s The New Appointment). In some parts of the
Eastern bloc, such as Czechoslovakia, there was no institutional censorship,
meaning that editors were entrusted with policing the suitability of texts.
In fact, even where censorship was legally enshrined, as in the Soviet Union,
the role of editors in preemptive censorship grew enormously (and was
privately satirized by writers as “hypercaution,” or perestrakhovka).
By contrast to this dispersal of censorial authority, the powers of the police
grew significantly in the period. In the two years after the crushing of the
Prague Spring, the Czechoslovak secret police doubled in size and thereafter
regularly harassed dissident and marginal writers, including Havel and Pavel
Kohout. In the 1970s, especially after Yurii Andropov’s appointment as police
chief, Soviet writers on the margins, and especially those in contact with
dissidents, were frequently searched, interrogated and intimidated by the
KGB. Although officially intended as a form of “prophylaxis” to cure any
incipient dissent, it often reduced writers to despair or anger, and eventually
hounded many not just out of Soviet literature but out of the country, as
happened with Vladimir Voinovich, Sergei Dovlatov, Georgii Vladimov and
many others. After the trial of Siniavskii and Daniel, Soviet writers were
rarely put on trial, however. Although the case against renegade authors was
often constructed by the secret police, it would usually be heard by the
Writers’ Union; these internal politics aimed to keep writers inside official
19 Dirk Kretzschmar, Politika i kulʹtura pri Brezhneve, Andropove i Chernenko, 1970–1985

(Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1997).
20 John Gordon Garrard and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (London:
I. B. Tauris, 1990).
387
polly jones
structures as well as to conceal disciplinary treatment from the outside world,

a particular concern during détente.
By contrast, the more lenient policy that usually held sway in Hungary was
punctuated by moments of demonstrative repression, such as the harassment
of the Budapest School in 1973 and the 1974 trial of the writer Miklós Haraszti.
The latter’s offense consisted in writing a critical, allegedly anti-socialist
account of factory life, A Worker in a Workers’ State and in circulating it
around friends for review while awaiting the verdict of official Hungarian
publications. The author’s trial, like that of Siniavskii and Daniel, witnessed
a display of solidarity from writers (including György Konrád and Iván
Szelényi) and a spirited defense of the socialist author’s rights to criticize
social inadequacies as well as to circulate a manuscript for comments without
being accused of full-scale “alternative” publishing. The defense failed, and
Haraszti thereafter produced exclusively samizdat and tamizdat.
The usual avoidance of blatant repression was not just out of concern for
appearances; socialist authorities had a considerable stake in trying to keep
writers, especially famous and talented figures, within the fold. Their public
presence and publications advertised that socialist culture could generate
works of high quality and cultivate prestigious writers despite the strident
claims of Cold War Western media. They also, at least in theory, kept writers
available to fulfill their traditional duties of propagandizing socialism and to
attract readers to socialist culture and away from the increasingly alluring
alternative media (in practice, though, many consumed both). In the 1960s
and 1970s, the Soviet authorities increasingly recognized the importance of
sophisticated, evocative and imaginative forms of propaganda in preventing
the population from migrating to unofficial and often anti-Soviet media.21
Andropov’s policy as KGB chief, and later briefly as Soviet leader, aimed to
encourage some intelligentsia creativity but also to keep a tight lid on any-
thing approaching dissent, an unworkable combination. In other parts of the
socialist bloc, too, new forms of propaganda were trialed, such as the
involvement of prestigious writers (after recantation for the Prague Spring)
in TV shows about normalization in Czechoslovakia.22
Given these complex dynamics of repression and cooptation, very few
offenses committed by writers were enough in and of themselves to exclude
21 Polly Jones, “The Fire Burns On? The ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ Biographical Series and
the Rethinking of Propaganda in the Brezhnev Era,” Slavic Review 74, 1 (Spring 2015),
32–56.
22 Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism After the 1968 Prague
Spring (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
388
them from the official literary world. Many writers accumulated fat files of
reports of misbehavior – ranging from petition-signing to samizdat and
tamizdat publications – before being finally expelled. What the writer and
dissident Lidiia Chukovskaia called “the process of exclusion” was often long,
though at a certain point it became inexorable.23 The rapid escalation of
repression against figures such as Siniavskii and Daniel and Solzhenitsyn was
thus atypical. Writers with less spectacular records of disobedience would
often be invited to recant controversial views, to renounce foreign publica-
tion or to engage in other demeaning rituals of reinclusion in socialist
literature, such as writing propagandistic works (in the Soviet Union, this
notion of sotszakaz was widely satirized in intelligentsia circles).
In Czechoslovakia, one of the most notorious examples of such compro-
mise was Bohumil Hrabal, who recanted on his previous reformist views and
publicly affirmed his commitment to socialism in 1975, and was then allowed
to publish certain works (though many continued to come out in samizdat,
or in samizdat editions to compensate for censored official versions, such as
his novel about the destruction of literature, Too Loud a Solitude). Several
Soviet writers likewise spent much of the late 1960s and 1970s alternating
between publication bans, as punishment for samizdat, tamizdat or associa-
tion with dissidents or petition-signing, and temporary permission to
publish.24 Throughout the Brezhnev era and until his emigration to Paris in
1976, Anatolii Gladilin fell in and out of favor with editors and consequently
disappeared and reappeared in Soviet publications; the same was true of
Vasilii Aksenov throughout the 1970s.
To some, such rituals were no more noble than the conformity of main-
stream writers. Vladimir Voinovich, having secured some time and suste-
nance with an official biography of Vera Figner in the early 1970s, defiantly
continued to write works without a chance of Soviet publication (such as his
multivolume political satire, Chonkin) and to sign political petitions. In 1974,
he was finally expelled from the Writers’ Union, though he remained in the
Soviet Union until his emigration in the early 1980s. However inevitable such
outcomes may seem in retrospect, the preceding negotiations at the margins
of official literature played an important role in destabilizing the boundaries
between official and unofficial writing and writers and in fueling “grey-zone”
literature.
23 Lidiia Chukovskaia, Protsess iskliucheniia. Ocherk literaturnykh nravov (Paris: YMCA-

Press, 1979).
24 Matich and Heim, Third Wave, 143.
389
polly jones
The Challenge to Socialist Realism

Just as the core institutions of socialist literature – the Writers’ Union, the
censorship, party oversight – remained in place in late socialism, despite the
seismic changes to the broader literary field, so too did Socialist Realism
persist as the hegemonic doctrine. Yet it was widely debated in the period, as
party authorities and literary critics grappled with the declining relevance of
the Stalinist model and the difficulty of generating a workable literary doc-
trine for mature socialism. As a result, several key aspects waned in theore-
tical importance, and even more so in practical decision-making, shared and
diluted across multiple bodies with different visions of what the doctrine now
meant.
Narodnost’, or popular accessibility, remained a powerful argument against
formal(ist) experimentation, though this did not in fact prevent many com-
plex narratives from appearing in official outlets, as below. However, socialist
authorities now projected a more sophisticated vision of popular tastes and
reading capabilities: After several decades of socialist power, the goal of
cultural politics had moved beyond literacy toward literary connoisseurship.
Moreover, personal improvement and pleasurable consumption were much
more central to the post-Stalinist social contract, with reading one of the key
embodiments of these promises.25
The need to show “reality in its revolutionary development,” which had
often meant the primacy of Romanticism over realism, was not renounced
either. However, the doctrine of developed socialism, with its infinitely
deferred communist future, meant that writers could legitimately focus on
the present without showing that future, or even any kind of happy ending.
This gradualism embedded in “developed socialism” and normalization also
reduced the necessity for literature to be aggressively mobilizational or
Promethean, as it had been in much of the Stalin era and in some Thaw-
era works too (such as the scientist stories of Daniil Granin and Vladimir
Dudintsev). The teleological thrust and hortatory tone of earlier literature
now seemed to lag behind popular literary tastes, which the regime itself had
helped to develop.
What was left, and most consistently enforced, was partiinost’ (party-
mindedness), always the most arbitrary element of the doctrine. In earlier
periods, writers had periodically been rebuked for not showing the party
leadership sufficiently (for example in Aleksandr Fadeev’s Young Guard, and
25 Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet
Eras (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
390
Khrushchev-era “trench prose”). However, plenty of Stalin-era and post-

Stalinist works were not just published, but praised, despite lacking
a significant party presence. In fact, it was sometimes safer not to touch on
the topic at all than to do so in a way that might attract the kind of
controversy caused by Dudintsev’s portrayal of corrupted party cadres in
Not by Bread Alone (1956). By late socialism, therefore, there was ample
precedent for a more capacious definition of “party-mindedness,” connoting
broad, if implicit, alignment with the party’s goals, and the absence of
criticism of the leadership. This policy automatically placed many overtly
politicized works of samizdat well beyond the pale, but it generated some
space to maneuver in official publications.
Social and moral criticism did not die out in late socialist literature and
enjoyed a certain resurgence once the Thaws had been tamed and a doctrinal
basis for developed socialism had been established, focusing on more modest
and gradual, though still teleological and anti-capitalist transformation. Such
criticism, sometimes not so different from that of the Thaw, could be
justified, given the ever looser definition of Socialist Realism and its growing
overlap with critical realism. In Czechoslovakia, published fiction began to
revive traditions of social criticism within a few years of the end of the Prague
Spring.26 One of very few notable Czech writers able to pursue a socialist
publication career relatively uninterrupted by the events of 1968–69, Vladimír
Páral consistently explored urban alienation and moral corruption. His debut
novel Catapult, published at the height of the Thaw in 1967, followed its
young male hero on a chaotic journey through multiple marital affairs and
attempts to acquire material goods and higher salaries, and ended with his
death, propelled into a metal aeroplane door by his frantic motion. The novel
satirized the hero’s hedonism and egotism, yet also seemed sympathetic to
his fundamental desire to “catapult” himself out of the banal routine of late
socialist urban life. Páral’s subsequent works included a five-volume exam-
ination of the alienation of modern life, told through the experience of Homo
statisticus.
György Konrád’s quasi-documentary novella, also on the theme of city
life, The Case Worker (1969), was granted only a limited circulation and small
print run in Hungary, and its author shifted into samizdat thereafter (and was
banned from employment four years later). The novella was strikingly bold
even for limited publication, determinedly focused on the “losers” of socialist
26 Robert Pynsent, “Social Criticism in Czech Literature of 1970s and 1980s

Czechoslovakia,” Bohemia 27, 1 (1986), 1–36.
391
polly jones
society. The eponymous welfare-state bureaucrat absconds from the daily

grind to live with a child orphaned by suicide, and returns to “normal” life
and work only with great reluctance, even despair, at the end. Meanwhile,
the late 1960s and 1970s Moscow stories of Yurii Trifonov, with their under-
hand transactions of scarce goods and materialistic attitudes, could just about
be justified as satirical contributions to the regime’s delicate balancing act
between increasingly consumption-based policies and the still reviled “petty-
bourgeois” (meshchanskii) mentality, as was also true of many late Soviet films
about consumerism.27
By contrast to these controversial representations of everyday urban life,
works about rural life produced by the Soviet “village prose” movement
enjoyed a relatively smooth transition from the Thaw to the early 1980s. This
was partly down to the power of the Russian nationalist lobby, but also to the
fact that these texts superficially aligned with socialist goals of tackling the
backwardness of rural life. In fact, though, many published portrayals of the
“village” portrayed it not so much as a space tragically neglected by socialist
modernization, but as a fragile repository of values destroyed by such “pro-
gress” elsewhere. The most striking example was Valentin Rasputin’s
Farewell to Matyora (1979), in which the building of a hydroelectric station
leads to flooding and to the destruction of a sacred way of life and the moral
foundations of Russia. Village prose has been likened to Stalinist Socialist
Realism, in its evocation of a timeless pastoral idyll.28 However, the apoca-
lyptic time and tragic tenor of Rasputin’s narrative suggested a desire to
reverse, not merely slow, movement toward the “glorious future.”
Many other works of published literature of the period also subverted
official temporality, in different ways. Although “developed socialism” and
“normalization” were modifications to the “charismatic” temporality of ear-
lier socialist regimes, they maintained a fundamental forward thrust.29
However, in many texts, the treatment of time was more complex, evoking
regret and doubt rather than the triumphant unfolding of the dialectic. Yurii
Trifonov’s late socialist works embodied his philosophy of the “interconnect-
edness” (slitnost’) of time periods and a poetics of retrospection and stream
of consciousness. This was not fundamentally at odds with regime self-
legitimation through the revolutionary past, but tended toward exploration
27 Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (London: Routledge,
2013).
28 Clark, Soviet Novel.
29 Stephen Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
392
of guilt and regret, especially for the aging and declining male heroes in House
on the Embankment, a Soviet literary sensation of the mid 1970s, or The Old
Man, of the late 1970s, which both traced the present’s moral decline to
Stalinist and revolutionary terror. Trifonov’s works appeared committed to
improving Soviet morality while at the same time implying that the ethical
problem lay at the heart of the regime; their multilayered, polyphonic texture
concealed and complicated such interpretations, however, contributing to his
impressive (though not total) success in publishing his works.
If such works staged retrospection, one of the most popular genres across
the Eastern bloc, the historical novel, plunged readers directly into the past.
There was nothing inherently subversive about writing about the distant past
or different political systems, since late socialist regimes increasingly sought
legitimacy in a broad range of predecessors. Interest in the pre-Soviet past
represented one of the few points of common interest between the intelli-
gentsia and socialist authorities, but their aims were often divergent. For
many writers and readers of historical fiction, the past represented an alter-
native, an escape or a salutary lesson, rather than the source of an unalloyed
ideal.
Some writers, such as the historian Natan Eidel’man were primarily
interested in popularizing factual historical research, especially about the
Decembrists. Yet, for the many literary writers who became hooked on
historical research in the Brezhnev era, such investigation highlighted the
psychological and ethical complexity of the past and pushed it beyond the
schematic and tendentious “use” that socialist regimes made of it. Trifonov
along with Yurii Davydov, another acclaimed Soviet historical novelist of the
period, used novels set in the nineteenth century to explore moral and
philosophical questions around political action (including terror) and
ideology.
Other writers of historical fiction allegorized the socialist present and
recent past. For instance, Bulat Okudzhava’s interest in the Decembrists
across several historical novels of the 1970s was partly rooted in parallels
with the dissident movement, while Anatolii Gladilin’s novel, The Gospel
According to Robespierre (1970), drew daring parallels between French
revolutionary and Stalinist terror. In other parts of the bloc, too, settings
such as the Counterreformation, the Napoleonic era, the German occupa-
tion of the Czech lands and nineteenth-century Estonia were used by Jiří
Šotola, Vladimír Körner, Ladislav Fuks and Jaan Kross respectively for
veiled critiques of contemporary restrictions on freedoms and human
rights.
393
polly jones
Historical prose thus emerged, over the 1970s, as one of the leading genres
of “Aesopian fiction.” Such complex treatments of time and space are testa-
ment to the greater thematic flexibility of Socialist Realism, but they also
indicate the degree to which published writing had to resort to circumlocu-
tion so as not to overstep the limits of the permissible. Some critics viewed
such complex poetics as one of the key “benefits” of socialist literary controls,
while others dismissed them as sad proof of the contortions and self-
censorship necessary to stay within official boundaries.30 In fact, while such
complexity helped to evade charges of subversion, it also gave rise to richly
polyphonic texts.
The works of Ladislav Fuks, who along with Vladimír Páral unusually
managed to stay within “official” Czechoslovak literature throughout late
socialism, are a case in point. Having survived the transition from the Prague
Spring with his official reputation unscathed, Fuks continued to publish
novels throughout the 1970s. His novel Of Mice and Mooshaber (1970) pre-
sented a hallucinatory picture of the eponymous heroine, mistreated by her
family and fellow citizens. Mrs. Mooshaber spends her time tending grave-
yards, yet improbably emerges as the new ruler of her country after the
popular overthrow of the ruling dictatorship, a fantasy with particular
resonance after 1968. Fuks’s works shared disorientating shifts of style and
an uncertain grasp on reality, helping them to evade charges of subversion,
but also expressing a deeper philosophy of openness.31
Chingiz Aitmatov, one of the most powerful and acclaimed late Soviet
novelists, also exploited ambiguity and allegory to multiply interpretations of
his texts. His 1980 novel, The Day Lasts Longer Than a Hundred Years was
among the most temporally and spatially ambitious, and ambiguous, works
of the period. At once the story of a Kyrgyz railway worker’s attempts to
preserve his culture’s ancient traditions, a suggestive fable of interplanetary
(non)communication, and a confrontation of memories of Stalinist repres-
sion, the novel spanned the ancient past, the Soviet era and the possible
future of the world, while moving through Soviet space, across Cold War
frontiers and beyond terrestrial space itself. Though analyzed as a creative
recombination of Socialist Realist tropes from across the doctrine’s long
30 E.g. the émigré press dispute: Malʹtsev, “Promezhutochnaia literatura,” and

Olga Shneerson, “Razreshennaia pravda,” Kontinent, 28 (1981). On “benefits,” see
Lev Losev, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian
Literature (Munich: O. Sagner in Kommission, 1984).
31 Rajendra A. Chitnis, “Remaining on the Threshold: The Cunning of Ladislav Fuks,”
Central Europe 2, 1 (2004), 47–59.
394
history, it can also be seen as an amalgam of contemporary official and

unofficial literature, including village prose, science fiction (as more famously
practiced by the Strugatskii brothers) and memory fiction about Stalinism.32
Aitmatov’s interwoven but not fully resolved storylines epitomize the use of
ambiguity and open-endedness to secure publication, and even critical
acclaim, in the period.
To some observers, this social criticism, historical enquiry and stylistic
experimentation seemed bold and even improbable: Had the editors and
censors let it slip through unnoticed?33 However, others suggested that they
were not “in between” official and unofficial literature, but fundamentally
complicit with the authorities, rooted in the same worldview.34 Whatever
the ultimate significance of this “grey-zone” literature, its undoubted
peak across the Eastern bloc was the 1970s. In fact, though, this decade –
especially its final years – also saw attrition of marginal texts and authors,
whether through migration into the underground or emigration. Many
Czech writers, including Kohout, Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký,
had departed by the end of the 1970s, but Soviet emigration became
especially widespread due to changed regulations on Jewish emigration
and the ever more oppressive cultural restrictions in the late 1970s and early
1980s.
It is thus the early 1980s that might best be described as a time of stagnation
of socialist culture, its creative forces depleted by these defections into other
“zones” and its limits ever more strictly policed. Conversely, the last years
before the changes of the late 1980s were a time when underground culture
flourished as never before, including in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
However, in the Soviet Union, émigré publishing was the main beneficiary,
so large was the number of writers who had left for France, Germany, the
United States and Israel.
All of these publishing worlds can be linked to the collapse of state
socialism. Tamizdat publications fueled, and were fueled by, Cold War anti-
communism, as the agendas of disillusioned writers chimed with the senti-
ments of Western publishers and readers and piled external pressure on the
region. Domestically, the networks of samizdat were as important to the
public sphere as the content of texts, allowing participants to imagine spaces
32 Katerina Clark, “The Mutability of the Canon: Socialist Realism and Chingiz
Aitmatov’s I dol’she veka dlitsia den’.” Slavic Review 43, 4 (Winter 1984), 573–87.
33 Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell (eds.), The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow Press, 1973), 17–22.
34 Mal’tsev, “Promezhutochnaia literatura.”
395
polly jones
of aesthetic and civic autonomy.35 “Grey-zone” literature, despite its eventual

decline, expressed a more flexible vision of socialist culture, while its minimal
partiinost’ suggested the increasing hollowness of official ideology. When
even such limited boundary-pushing declined in the 1980s, the resulting
stagnation served as a warning to revitalize socialist culture before its audi-
ence was lost entirely to alternative zones; however, in the Soviet Union, the
succession of short-lived conservative leaders after Brezhnev and before
Gorbachev hampered any such change.
The expansion of the limits of socialist culture and its attempted reintegra-
tion of social criticism and aesthetic creativity were fundamental to Mikhail
Gorbachev’s project of glasnost’. The rapid expansion of socialist culture
across the Eastern bloc during the second half of the 1980s enticed many
dissidents (such as Havel) and émigrés (such as Voinovich) back into public
activities and also revitalized the careers of writers who had survived within
precarious niches of late socialism (such as Sergei Zalygin and Grigorii
Baklanov, who edited major Soviet journals and magazines during glasnost’).
In literature, every taboo, from sex and drugs to criticism of Stalinism and
socialism, was broken within a half-decade of reform, while the Soviet-era
canon transformed equally rapidly thanks to publication of formerly prohib-
ited works by Anna Akhmatova, Andrei Platonov, Osip Mandel’shtam, Vasilii
Grossman, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many others. However, socialist
culture could tolerate for only so long this attempt to integrate previously
separate zones, and its own foundations rapidly dissolved in the ever more
radical changes of the time. The contours of the cultural map that emerged
after the collapse of state socialism have proved far harder to trace than even
the complex late socialist zones examined here.
Bibliographical Essay
On the institutionalization of Socialist Realism, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet
Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and
Evgenii Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007). Archive-based studies of the Soviet “Thaw” include:
Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet
Union, 1953–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Denis Kozlov,
The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge,
35 Bolton, Worlds of Dissent; Ann Komaromi, “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics,”
Slavic Review 71, 1 (Spring 2012), 70–90.
396
MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd
(eds.), The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2013). On comparisons of Eastern bloc “Thaws,”
see Harold B. Segel, The Columbia Guide to the Literatures of Eastern Europe Since
1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Marcel Cornis-Pope and
John Neubauer (eds.), History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe:
Junctures and Disjunctures in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004).
On the post-Stalinist intelligentsia, see Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children:
The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2009); Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and
the Soviet State 1917 to the Present (London: Verso, 1989). Late Soviet cultural
politics is currently analyzed mostly in memoirs and Russian-language scho-
larship, of which the most systematic is Dirk Kretzschmar, Politika i kulʹtura
pri Brezhneve, Andropove i Chernenko, 1970–1985 [Politics and Culture Under
Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, 1970–1985] (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1997).
Older studies of Soviet literary institutions (John Gordon Garrard and
Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union [London: I. B. Tauris, 1990];
Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell [eds.], The Soviet Censorship [Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973]) still contain valuable insights for the period.
Useful overviews of Czechoslovak literary politics include Jiří Holý, Writers
Under Siege: Czech Literature Since 1945 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press,
2008), and Milan Š imeč ka, The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of
Czechoslovakia 1969–1976 (London: Verso, 1984), while the normalization-era
intelligentsia is analyzed in Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the
Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), and Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and
His TV: The Culture of Communism After the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2010). Writers’ polemics against official culture include
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf (London: Collins and Harvill,
1980), and Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
Much valuable analysis of “official” literature appeared during and just
after the period. On Soviet literature, see Deming Brown’s Soviet Russian
Literature Since Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) and
The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature: Prose Fiction, 1975–1991 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), as well as Nicholas Shneidman, Soviet
Literature in the 1970s: Artistic Diversity and Ideological Conformity (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1979), and Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist
Realism: Soviet Fiction Since Ivan Denisovich (London: Granada, 1980). The only
397
polly jones
book-length study of “Aesopian” language remains Lev Losev, On the

Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature
(Munich: O. Sagner in Kommission, 1984). In addition to Segel, Holý and
Cornis-Pope, wide-ranging accounts of Czechoslovak literature include
Rajendra Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe:
The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, 1988–1998 (London:
Routledge Curzon, 2005), and Robert Pynsent, “Social Criticism in Czech
Literature of 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia,” Bohemia 27, 1 (1986), 1–36.
Samizdat is an area of burgeoning interest, thanks to access to documents
and interest in alternative public spheres: Jan C. Behrends and Thomas
Lindenberger (eds.), Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere: Transnational
Perspectives (Vienna: Lit, 2014), Ann Komaromi, Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and
the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2015), and two special issues of Poetics Today, edited by Vladislav
Todorov, “Publish & Perish: Samizdat and Underground Cultural Practices in
the Soviet Bloc,” 29, 4 (2008) and 30, 1 (2009). Tamizdat has received less
attention, with the exception of the ground-breaking volumes Friederike Kind-
Kovács, Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the
Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014); and
Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov (eds.), Samizdat, Tamizdat, and
Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2013).
398

The Zones of Late Socialist Literature

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Zones of Late Socialist Literature

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Zones of Late Socialist Literature

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

15

The Zones of Late Socialist Literature

1 For a succinct outline, see D. Pospielovsky, “From ‘Gosizdat’ to ‘Samizdat’ and

The Emergence of New Zones

including professional autonomy, freedom to criticize and doctrinal diversity.

9 George Schopﬂin, “Opposition and Para-Opposition: Critical Currents in Hungary,

Entering and Leaving Samizdat and Tamizdat

to as wide a public as possible. Many writers therefore had little desire to

12 Leopold Labedz (ed.), Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (Harmondsworth, UK:

14 Martin Daughtry, “‘Sonic Samizdat’: Situating Unofﬁcial Recording in the Post-Stalinist

culminating in the drafting of the Charter 77 petition and other seminal

needed, some argued, was a literature “outside” Soviet concerns (vnesovetskaia),

Policing the Zones of Literature

17 Matich and Heim, Third Wave, 32.

19 Dirk Kretzschmar, Politika i kulʹtura pri Brezhneve, Andropove i Chernenko, 1970–1985

structures as well as to conceal disciplinary treatment from the outside world,

23 Lidiia Chukovskaia, Protsess iskliucheniia. Ocherk literaturnykh nravov (Paris: YMCA-

The Challenge to Socialist Realism

Khrushchev-era “trench prose”). However, plenty of Stalin-era and post-

26 Robert Pynsent, “Social Criticism in Czech Literature of 1970s and 1980s

society. The eponymous welfare-state bureaucrat absconds from the daily

30 E.g. the émigré press dispute: Malʹtsev, “Promezhutochnaia literatura,” and

history, it can also be seen as an amalgam of contemporary ofﬁcial and

of aesthetic and civic autonomy.35 “Grey-zone” literature, despite its eventual

book-length study of “Aesopian” language remains Lev Losev, On the

You might also like