At Russia Beyond the Headlines (which continues to offer a variety of fun literary coverage -- you do have it bookmarked, don't you ?) Anastasia Gorbatova reminds of When literature came under state control: 80 years since the First Congress of Soviet Writers.
As she notes:
Attendees at the congress included Boris Pasternak, the foremost Soviet poet of the time, the "Red Count" Alexei Tolstoy, a nobleman who adjusted to the demands of Soviet power, future Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov, and leading children's author Korney Chukovsky.But, of course, the defining figure was Andrei Zhdanov -- Mr. Socialist Realism himself, the man who latched onto Stalin's 'writers-are-engineers-of-human-souls' idea and ran with it, ushering in the lowliest times of socialist realism (pre-1934 Soviet literature, like pre-code Hollywood cinema, was actually pretty happening).
Maxim Gorky gave a keynote lecture to close the event on September 1.
Yes, this was the guy who said:
I think that every one of our Soviet writers can say to any dull-witted bourgeois, to any philistine, to any bourgeois writer who may talk about our literature being tendencious: "Yes, our Soviet literature is tendencious, and we are proud of this fact, because the aim of our tendency is to liberate the toilers, to free all mankind from the yoke of capitalist slavery."'Noble' sentiments -- but, hey, 1934, under Stalin, you know the deal ..... (The marxists.org page suggests: "Zhdanov died on 31st August 1934"; yeah, not quite/no such luck .....)
Marxists.org has good documentation (other than hopefully killing off Zhdanov way prematurely ...) on that first congress -- worth being reminded of.
Meanwhile, as Anastasia Gorbatova notes:
There were only eight congresses between 1934 and 1986, and they increasingly became formal events with almost no influence on Soviet culture. The First Congress was unique in its own way -- it was the first and last successful attempt to unite all the writers of one countryWhereby 'successful' is a matter of ... opinion. Add a Comment