Soviet Literature in the Sixties (1965) examines the Soviet literary scene and its changes following the death of Stalin. Not least among these changes was the increasing freedom given to writers to protest against the injustices of Soviet life and to question the consistency of socialist realism.

Introduction: Literature and the Political Problem 1. Since 1917: A Brief History Soviet Literature Persistence of the Past Fellow Travelers Proletarians The Stalinists Socialist Realism The Thaw The Sixties and Seventies 2. Mayakovsky and the Left Front of Art The Suicide Note Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy The Cloud "The Backbone Flute" The Commune and the Left Front The Bedbug and The Bath Mayakovsky as a Monument Poets of Different Camps 3. Prophets of a Brave New World The Machine and England Olesha's Critique of the Reason Envy and Rage 4. The Intellectuals, I Serapions Boris Pilnyak: Biology and History 5. The Intellectuals, II Isaac Babel: Horror in a Minor Key Konstantin Fedin: The Confrontation with Europe Leonov and Katayev Conclusion 6. The Proletarians, I The Proletcult The Blacksmith Poets Yury Libedinsky: Communists as Human Beings Tarasov-Rodionov: ,"Our Own Wives, Our Own Children" Dmitry Furmanov: An Earnest Commissar A. S. Serafimovich: A Popular Saga 7. The Proletarians, II Fyodor Gladkov: A Literary Autodidact Alexander Fadeyev: The Search for a New Leo Tolstoy Mikhail Sholokhov: The Don Cossacks A Scatter of Minor Deities Conclusion 8. The Critic Voronsky and the Pereval Group Criticism and the Study of Literature Voronsky Pereval 9. The Levers of Control under Stalin Resistance The Purge The Literary State 10. Zoshchenko and the Art of Satire 11. After Stalin: The First Two Thaws Pomerantsev, Panova, and The Guests Ilya Ehrenburg and Alexey Tolstoy The Second Thaw The Way of Pasternak 12. Into the Underground The Literary Parties The Trouble with Gosizdat End of a Thaw Buried Treasure: Platonov and Bulgakov The Exodus into Samizdat and Tamizdat Sinyavsky 13. Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps One Day The First Circle and The Cancer Ward The Gulag The Calf and the Oak: Dichtung and Wahrheit Other Contributions to the Epic 14. The Surface Channel, I: The Village 15. The Surface Channel, II: Variety of Theme and Style The City: Intelligentsia, Women, Workers The Backwoods: Ethical Problems Other New Voices of the Sixties and Seventies World War II Published Poets A Final Word on Socialist Realism 16. Exiles, Early and Late The Exile Experience "Young Prose" and What Became of It Religious Quest: Maximov and Ternovsky Truth through Obscenity: Yuz Aleshkovsky Transcendence and Tragedy: Erofeev's Trip Poetry of the Daft: Sasha Sokolov Perversion of Logic as Ideology: Alexander Zinoviev A Gathering of Writers Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index

The aim of the thesis is firstly to investigate the overriding characteristics that would allow us to establish the paradigm of the 'shestidesiatnik' writer; and secondly to investigate and demonstrate how through the medium of metaphor and allusion the artists succeeded in conveying their alienation from the tenets of Soviet state ideology. Selected works by Soviet writers (one each by Shmelev and Kariakin and four stories by Tendriakov) have been chosen as case studies. Shmelev utilises the metaphor of the medieval Russian text Domostroi to convey his ideas. His fictional discourse focuses on what he thinks should be the norms of social life and the basic elements of these he finds in the pragmatics of Domostroi. As a fiction writer, Shmelev appears as a rather contradictory figure because in his polemics with advocates of a Western model (he makes allusions to the 19th-century Westernisers) he insists that Russian history ostensibly had its own model on offer, i.e. the pragmatics of Domostroi. However, what emerges from his reflections (his thesis is 'charity as the most effective political tool') reveals the principles that comprised the basic elements of the bourgeois revolution, e.g. individual and commercial freedom, support for the middle class, 'compromise and moderation,' etc. In his fiction in the late 1970s he was more radical than in his publicistics of the late 1980s. The message of Kariakin's work is projected along two channels: firstly it is coded criticism of the state ideology and secondly it is a coded discussion of the predicament of the sixties generation. Kariakin takes Raskolnikov's self-deception as a model of the shestidesiatniki's self-deception. Tendriakov, the third writer, serves as an example of someone who conforms to Kariakin's model as well as someone who like Kariakin underwent a profound evolution and this work offers the analysis of the dialectics of the consciousness of the two authors. The three writers, who otherwise in their official capacity enjoyed the privileges of the state system, serve as salient example of the artistic striving for freedom of expression. Two of the writers, Shmelev and Kariakin, expressed their ideas in a complex Aesopian language that could allow them, censorship permitting, to be published, and which would demand of the audience.