Stalinism and the Making of the Village Writer, 1928–1953 | CU Experts

Abstract; Chapter 1 follows the lives of two generations of Soviet village writers during the Stalin era and discusses the emergence of Soviet literary institutions. The first generation of village writers was born in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This group, including the famous Russian poet Aleksandr Tvardovskii, became the main architects of the Stalinist image of the village in literature, which portrayed the Party and the urban worker as the bearers of socialist enlightenment to the backwards peasantry. The second generation, born in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, experienced Stalin’s violent transformation of the village through collectivization first hand. Their rural childhoods, along with their experiences of migration to cities and integration into Soviet cultural institutions in the late Stalinist period, caused them to identify strongly with their village origins. Their experiences of Stalin’s oppressive policies became the subject their later literary works and ultimately inspired them to challenge the Communist Party’s claim to be the leading moral force in Soviet society.

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