Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...afraid. I'm worried.' " He should be, for he will share the blame with the film's creators if something offends someone further up the line -a cultural bureaucrat in one of the republics, or perhaps even the Central Committee in Moscow. Like Stalin before him, Brezhnev has been known to enter these debates. He once got a movie shelved simply by inquiring after a screening, "Who needs...
...cover the whole world with asphalt, but a few blades of green grass will always break through," concluded Soviet Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, as the Stalin era faded. And still they come: surprising new writers who have shattered the deadening conventions of the past. They have recoiled from the novel, viewing it as prefabricated Stalinist architecture. The genre of choice is the short story or novella. Many writers have managed gradually to escape from Socialist Realism, with its obligatory jargon and hortatory themes, traveling a world away -back to 19th century realism. Even Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the two major...
...short story writers to emerge since Stalin's death, Vasili Aksyonov, 47, continues to display the greatest virtuosity. Although he has written enormously popular stories in a realist vein, Aksyonov has gone on to explore a variety of modes and permutations of language, entering the 1980s as the Soviet Union's only truly modern prose writer. His evolution is instructive. Aksyonov's first fiction dealt with a previously unheard-of theme: the real life of Soviet teenagers...
Much of Aksyonov's fiction has a dark and enigmatic cast that is the shadow of the Gulag. Like many other contemporary Soviet writers, he is the child of Stalin's victims: Aksyonov was brought up in one of the infamous orphanages called Homes for the Children of Enemies of the People. Few writers can reproduce the lingering stench of brutality and fear better than he. In his story Victory, a gem of Russian short fiction, a chance game of chess on a train between a brutish but canny player and an intellectual becomes a moral life...
Vladimov's allegory of contemporary Soviet society, which was inspired by an actual event, hardly needs to be explained to Soviet readers. As a fable of literary life, it signifies that the official hounds schooled under Stalin are likely to keep biting at the heels of insubordinate writers in the Soviet Union for a long time to come...