Russia Lit

Leo Tolstoy

Wrote• “War and Peace”• “Anna Karenina”• “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

• Rejects the mainstream self-indulgent values

• Believed he had a duty to portray life honestly

Soviet Lit

• Alexander Blok (revolutionary poet)• Wrote- “The Twelve”; embraced the

revolutionary ideas

• Vladimir mayakousky• Wrote- “Americans Wonder”– Forced people to notice the events taking place

around them

Propaganda

• Lit used for propaganda

• “socialist realism” idolizes socialism + Marxist-Leninist views; capitalism=evil; praised family ideals, loyalty to the revolution, and importance of hard work

Censorship under Stalin

• Writers forced to join Union of Soviet writers in order to publish their works

• Writers persecuted, imprisoned, killed

• Authors’ works censored, forced to remove parts of stories/poems that criticized the czar in any way, so they hid the criticism in the story plots

Title

• “In the struggle against lies, art has always won and always will. Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.”– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

• Early lit. mostly religious works, folktales, and poems

• “The Song of Prince Igor’s Campaign”- written in 1190’s, most famous of early writings

• 1800’s: Russia’s “Golden Age” of lit.

The thaw

• Government finally made censorship more lenient

• (writer) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “One day in the Life of Ivan Denisouich” (criticized Stalin’s government)

• (poet) Yeugeny Yeutushenko: “Babi Yar” (criticized Russian anti-Semitism under Stalin)

writer

• Boris Pasternak (writer)• Could not publish novel “Dr. Zhivago”

• Was forced by soviet government to refuse his reward of the Nobel Prize for lit.

samizdat

• Way of avoiding censorship• System of published work in secret (smuggled

works out of the country to be published else where)

• For writers who criticized government