The Vologda Network | CU Experts

Abstract; Chapter 4 focuses on the Russian North, where in the 1950s and 1960s a group of Russian village writers from the literary backwater of Vologda formed a powerful patronage network. It centers on the unlikely literary career of Sergei Vikulov, an influential figure in the conservative Russian nationalist movement. The chapter traces the patronage relationship between Vikulov and the poet Aleksandr Yashin, which enabled the formation of the Vologda network. In the early 1960s, literary works by Yashin and the future Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were at the center of a literary controversy over the depiction of the impact of Stalinism on the traditional Russian peasantry. Opposition to Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of the traditional peasantry as the moral heart of the Russian nation sank Solzhenitsyn’s nomination for the Lenin Prize in 1964, but in subsequent years rural nationalism found supporters among the conservative, neo-Stalinist literary elite. The Vologda network of Russian Village Prose writers that Vikulov and Yashin forged championed the rural Russian periphery as the true heartland of the Russian nation. When Vikulov became the head editor of the journal Nash sovremennik in 1968, he transformed the journal into a powerful megaphone for the Vologda network’s conservative brand of rural Russian nationalism.

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