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Reflections on Soviet Novels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Alexander Gerschenkron
Alexander Gerschenkron
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

There is every likelihood that future historians of the Russian novel will praise the Soviet period for the record number of volumes produced and blame it for an equally unprecedented decline in artistic standards. Yet one may hope that the twenty-first-century critic, in fairness to an unhappy past, will not overlook a redeeming feature of the Soviet novel, i.e., its considerable anthropological value. The present reflections about a few recent or fairly recent Soviet novels do not deal with their literary qualities. They are concerned exclusively with the light these novels cast upon various aspects of everyday life in Soviet Russia, including, it may be added, the life of the novel makers themselves.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , January 1960 , pp. 165 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1960

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References

1 Russkii les; the page references below are to Sobraniye sochinenii (Collected Worlds), Vol. VI, Moscow, 1956.

2 Cf., e.g., Popov, V. A., Lesnaya promyshlennost S.S.S.R. (The Forest Industry of the U.S.S.R.), Vol. 1, Lesoekspluatatsiya (Forest Exploitation), Goslesbumizdat, 1957, pp. 15 and 33.Google Scholar

3 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York, 1903Google Scholar, particularly pp. 166 et seq.

4 Das Kapital, Volksausgabc, Moscow, 1932, p. 513.

5 In what appears to be her latest novel, Derzaniye (Daring—Moscow, 1959), Kopty-ayeva proceeds to wreck the second marriage of the surgeon, who leaves his wife in order to correct an error of choice made in Stalingrad a decade earlier. Fortunately for the abandoned wife, she too is put on the road to an alternative happiness.

6 Nos. 3–7; in subsequent references, only the issue and page numbers will be cited.

7 Etymologically, the term blat comes from lthe German Platie—i.e., gang (of criminals or rowdies). It probably fits well into the Russian language because of the subconscious association with the Church-Slavonic blato, swamp or filth.

8 In this respect, the present novel is very different from Nikolayeva's earlier novel, Zhatva (Harvest), for which, in 1950, she received the Stalin Prize. The high award was richly deserved. For in that fully standardized and altogether uncritical presentation of life on a postwar collective farm, public and private happy endings were indeed one and indivisible.

9 Brat'ya Yershovy appeared in 1958 in Neva, Nos. 6–7; in subsequent references only the issue and page numbers will be cited.