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