Evgeny Dobrenko (born 4 April 1962) is a Russian-American historian. Born in Odessa, he moved to Moscow and worked at Moscow State University and the Russian State University for the Humanities. He emigrated to the US and worked at Duke University, Stanford University, UC Irvine, Amherst College and NYU. He then moved to the UK, and worked at the University of Nottingham and the University of Sheffield. He is now professor of Russian studies at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. [1] [2] [3]
His lifelong area of academic interest has been Stalinist culture. He was awarded the Efim Etkind Prize for the best book about Russian Culture in 2012 and the AATSEEL Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship in 2019. His book Late Stalinism was nominated for the Pushkin House Book Prize.
Socialist realism was the official cultural doctrine of the Soviet Union that mandated an idealized representation of life under socialism in literature and the visual arts. The doctrine was first proclaimed by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 as approved method for Soviet cultural production in all media. In the aftermath of World War II, socialist realism was adopted by the communist states that were politically aligned with the Soviet Union. The primary official objective of socialist realism was "to depict reality in its revolutionary development" although no formal guidelines concerning style or subject matter were provided.
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, popularly known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer and proponent of socialism. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia, its émigrés, and to Russian-language literature. Major contributors to Russian literature, as well as English for instance, are authors of different ethnic origins, including bilingual writers, such as Kyrgyz novelist Chinghiz Aitmatov. At the same time, Russian-language literature does not include works by authors from the Russian Federation who write exclusively or primarily in the native languages of the indigenous non-Russian ethnic groups in Russia, thus the famous Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov is omitted.
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Bolshevik Soviet People's Commissar (Narkompros) responsible for the Ministry of Education as well as an active playwright, critic, essayist, and journalist throughout his career.
Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov was a Soviet politician. He was the Soviet Union's "propagandist-in-chief" after the Second World War, and was responsible for developing the Soviet cultural policy, the Zhdanov Doctrine, which remained in effect until the death of Joseph Stalin. Zhdanov was considered Stalin's most likely successor but died before him.
Yury Karlovich Olesha was a Russian and Soviet novelist. He is considered one of the greatest Russian novelists of the 20th century, one of the few to have succeeded in writing works of lasting artistic value despite the stifling censorship of the era. His works are delicate balancing acts that superficially send pro-Communist messages but reveal far greater subtlety and richness upon a deeper reading. Sometimes, he is grouped with his friends Ilf and Petrov, Isaac Babel, and Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky into the Odessa School of Writers.
Soviet nonconformist art was Soviet art produced in the former Soviet Union outside the control of the Soviet state started in the Stalinist era, in particular, outside of the rubric of Socialist Realism. Other terms used to refer to this phenomenon are Soviet counterculture, "underground art" or "unofficial art".
Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshitz was a Soviet Marxian literary critic and philosopher of art who had a long and controversial career in the former Soviet Union. In the 1930s, he strongly influenced Marxist views on aesthetics while being a close associate of György Lukács. He also published important compilations of early Marxist literature on the role of art. In 1975, he was elected as a full member of the USSR Academy of Arts.
Russian nationalism is a form of nationalism that promotes Russian cultural identity and unity. Russian nationalism first rose to prominence as a Pan-Slavic enterprise during the 19th century Russian Empire, and was repressed during the early Bolshevik rule. Russian nationalism was briefly revived through the policies of Joseph Stalin during and after the Second World War, which shared many resemblances with the worldview of early Eurasianist ideologues.
Marietta Sergeevna Shaginyan was a Soviet writer, historian and activist of Armenian descent. She was one of the "fellow travelers" of the 1920s led by the Serapion Brotherhood and became one of the most prolific communist writers experimenting in satirico-fantastic fiction.
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky was a prominent humanist Marxist literary critic, theorist and editor of the 1920s, disfavored and purged in 1937 for his work with the Left Opposition and Leon Trotsky during and after the October Revolution. Voronsky's writings were hidden away in the Soviet Union, until his autobiography, Waters of Life and Death, and anthology, Art as the Cognition of Life were translated and published in English.
Boris Viktorovich Tomashevsky was a Russian Formalist literary critic, theorist of poetry, textual analyst, historian of Russian literature, Pushkin scholar, translator, and writer. He was a member of the Moscow linguistic circle, the OPOJAZ and the Union of Soviet Writers.
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
Anatoly Vladimirovich Sofronov was a Soviet Russian writer, poet, playwright, scriptwriter, editor and literary administrator, the Union of Soviet Writers' secretary in 1948-1953. Sofronov was a Stalin Prize laureate and a recipient of the Order of the Hero of Socialist Labour (1981).
Aleksei Ivanovich Stetskii was a Russian Soviet politician, journalist and official and propagandist of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
The anti-cosmopolitan campaign was an anti-Western campaign in the Soviet Union which began in late 1948 and has been widely described as a thinly disguised antisemitic purge. A large number of Jews were persecuted as Zionists or rootless cosmopolitans.
This is a select bibliography of post-World War II English-language books and journal articles about Stalinism and the Stalinist era of Soviet history. Book entries have references to journal reviews about them when helpful and available. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below.
Ivan Mikhailovich Gronsky was a Russian Soviet public figure, journalist, literary critic and Communist Party official, who survived long imprisonment in the Gulag.
Katerina Clark was an Australian scholar of Soviet studies. After getting her postgraduate degrees at Australian National University and Yale University, she began working as a professor of Russian and Slavic studies, including at Yale. As an academic, she wrote several books: The Soviet Novel (1981); Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), which she wrote with her husband Michael Holquist; Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (1998); Moscow, the Fourth Rome (2011); and Eurasia without Borders (2021).
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