Word: stalinizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...authors (Kuprin, Bunin) went into exile voluntarily; disillusionment led others (Yesenin, Mayakovsky) to suicide. To give literature drive and direction, and broaden its appeal, the party formed the Union of Soviet Writers, headed by famed Maxim Gorky. But Gorky's optimistic ideas about "socialist realism" did not suit Stalin. The dictator found his man in Fadeyev, the steely-eyed...
...Union of Soviet Writers was a well-drilled literary claque which dutifully applauded Stalin's deal with Hitler and praised his "military genius" when the Germans drove to the outskirts of Moscow. The union helped whip up enthusiasm for the "patriotic war," and Fadeyev himself produced a long, turgid novel called Young Guard about underground operations in the Ukraine. The Kremlin's kept writers grew fat on the war (Young Guard sold 3,000,000 copies), but when it was all over, Stalin cut them down to size in a new purge. Described as "filthy" and "obscene...
After the slobbering eulogies around Stalin's bier, there was a great silence in the Union of Soviet Writers. Then, almost two years later, under the weight of Ilya Ehrenburg's The Thaw, the ice broke. But no Writers' Union congress could revive the dead, nor could so many veteran sycophants make sense of their new function. Sensing change, Fadeyev handed down a new line, appealed for less "socialist realism." At the sensational 20th Party Congress last February, Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (whose way of protesting the Stalinist regime had been to produce almost no creative work since...
...Writers' Union, this month began publishing Bruno Yasienki's long-suppressed novel, The Plot of the Indifferent, with a preface by his widow referring to his "arrest based on the slander of provocateurs." In the strange dialectic of Communist Russia, yes was rapidly becoming no. An old Stalin-line man could no longer remain indifferent. Last week Tass News Agency reported the end. In his luxurious apartment, Alexander Fadeyev shot himself. The cause, said Tass, was chronic alcoholism and "grave mental depression...
Died. Alexander A. Fadeyev, 55, top Soviet literary theorist of the late Stalin era (The Rout, Young Guard); reportedly by his own hand; in Moscow (see FOREIGN NEWS...