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The Soviet Cold War Literary Imagination

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Abstract

Focusing on the formative years of the Cold War, this chapter examines the evolution of the main genres of Soviet writing (mostly political poetry and international journalism) and the main topics that the writing addressed. These include the Soviet ‘struggle for peace’, the Western conspiracy against the USSR and the struggle of progressive Westerners and communists against the supporters of war with the Soviet Union. Grounded in the reworking of propaganda from the Second World War, the political poetry of Konstantin Simonov, Nikolai Tikhonov and Alexei Surkov and the political journalism of Ilya Ehrenburg and Leonid Leonov dominated Soviet literature in the late Stalinist period and went on to have a lasting impact in the following decades.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term was officiated in the pages of Pravda in August 1948 in the wake of the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, held in Wrocław, Poland (see Timothy Johnston, ‘Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet “Struggle for Peace in All the World”, 1948–54’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 86: 2 (2008), pp. 259–82; and Vladimir Dobrenko, Conspiracy of Peace: The Cold War, the International Peace Movement, and the Soviet Peace Campaign, 1946–1956 (2016).

  2. 2.

    In July 1955, the Heads of Government of the four Great Powers (the USA, the United Kingdom, France and the USSR) met in Geneva to discuss European security, disarmament and East–West relations for the first time in 10 years. Although they did not reach agreement, the meeting produced a climate of détente. As Günter Bischof and Saki Dockrill detail in Cold War Respite (2000), there was even talk of a new ‘Geneva spirit’, referring to the peaceful climate which had inspired the League of Nations in the inter-war years. Despite these encouraging signs, however, the distrust and ideological opposition between the two blocs continued.

  3. 3.

    See Vladimir Dobrenko, Conspiracy of Peace: The Cold War, the International Peace Movement, and the Soviet Peace Campaign, 1946–1956 (unpublished doctoral thesis, The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2016), pp. 187–98.

  4. 4.

    Quoted in A.V. Fateev, Obraz vraga v sovetskoi propagande 1945–1954 gg. (Moscow: IRI RAN, 1999), p. 79 (all translations from the Russian are by Jesse Savage).

  5. 5.

    See Eliot Borenstein, Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (2019).

  6. 6.

    See Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 209–32.

  7. 7.

    Leonov, ‘Beseda s demonom’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 31 December 1947, p. 2.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., p. 2.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., p. 2.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., p. 2.

  11. 11.

    Leonov, ‘Rassuzhdenie o velikanakh’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 27 September 1947, p. 3.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., p. 3. As he continues, ‘we cannot be otherwise, we are more clear-sighted, we are older in the human race’ (ibid., p. 3).

  14. 14.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  24. 24.

    Leonov, Speech at the First All-Union Conference of Peace Advocates (1949), State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Fond 9539.

  25. 25.

    Ibid.

  26. 26.

    Ibid.

  27. 27.

    Ehrenburg, Za mir (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1952), p. 14.

  28. 28.

    See Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (2011).

  29. 29.

    Ehrenburg, Za mir, p. 18.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., pp. 284, 285.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., pp. 23–4.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., p. 25.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., p. 37.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., pp. 38, 196.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., p. 144.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., p. 130.

  37. 37.

    See Evgeny Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti: Literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskom osveshchenie (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1993), pp. 138–208. ‘Defence literature’, which aimed to mobilise the population and spread military propaganda, was first developed by the literary association of the Red Army and Navy (LOCAF). Although LOCAF had been liquidated after the creation of a single Writers Union in 1932, the literature continued to be actively created within the Soviet Union and was sponsored by the state.

  38. 38.

    Smirnov, ‘Dva flaga’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira! Stikhi sovetskikh poetov (Moscow: Sovietskii pisatel’, 1949), p. 3.

  39. 39.

    Simonov, ‘Krasnye i belye’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 152.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., p. 152.

  41. 41.

    Pidsukha, ‘Moei docheri’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 132.

  42. 42.

    Iurii Borev, ‘Dorogi istorii’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 32; Victor Bershadskii, ‘Vstrecha v Novorossiiske’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 30.

  43. 43.

    Ventslova, ‘Splotim riady’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 71.

  44. 44.

    Bukov, ‘Solntse mira’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 34.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., p. 34.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., p. 34.

  47. 47.

    Surkov, ‘Vozvys’te golos, chestnye liudi!’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 171.

  48. 48.

    Zharov, ‘Vsei siloi!’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 162.

  49. 49.

    Dolmatovskii, ‘Budet li voina?’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 57.

  50. 50.

    Baukov, ‘Mir dlia etogo nuzhen mne’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 20.

  51. 51.

    Surkov, ‘Na tegeranskom bazare’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 174.

  52. 52.

    Surkov, ‘Doroga na Iug’, in Anon, ed., V zashchitu mira!, p. 176.

  53. 53.

    See, for example, N.V. Pokrovskaia’s edited Za mir: Poeticheskoe tvorchestvo trudiashchikhsia (1951) and the anonymously edited Stikhi o mire: Sbornik stikhov Kaluzhskogo oblastnogo literaturnogo ob’edineniia (1952).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Evgeny Dobrenko

  2. Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

    Vladimir Dobrenko

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  1. Evgeny Dobrenko
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  2. Vladimir Dobrenko
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Correspondence to Evgeny Dobrenko or Vladimir Dobrenko .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Andrew Hammond

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Dobrenko, E., Dobrenko, V. (2020). The Soviet Cold War Literary Imagination. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_25

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