“The party⇔s commands or the heart⇔s desire⇦⇝: several pages from the history of the Sverdlovsk branch of the Union of Soviet Writers (1946)

Abstract

The article considers the traces of external influences on the works of Soviet (including Ural) writers in the first post-war year, which marked the end of the so-called first thaw period (1943–1946), a brief spiritual upsurge in the society recovering from the global catastrophe. In this article, the term external influence refers to the ideological pressure coming from the literary critics, colleagues, and other similar phenomena of Soviet culture expressed in ideological discourse. Addressing historical materials that preserved such evidence makes it possible to see the goals of the authorities aiming to control creative processes and, to a certain extent, intellectual and moral level of the authorities themselves as well. The protocols of general and party meetings of the Sverdlovsk branch of the Union of Soviet Writers for 1946 used in this study can be attributed to this kind of documentary sources. Theoretically, the analysis builds on E. A. Dobrenko’s ideas about “formation of the Soviet writer” and on the concept of “ideal type of social realism writer” proposed by T. A. Kruglova, as well as on the understanding of socialist realism as a method of structuring a literary work within the framework of socialist ideology. It was impossible to ignore the impact that the resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party on the journals “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” (August 14, 1946) had made on the Soviet writers. It provoked numerous discussions on “insufficiently high ideological level” of fiction in the regional branches of the Union of Soviet Writers, and restricted the course of national literature that impeded its development for years. Much attention is paid to the discussion of the unpublished short story “Meeting” (1946) by the Ural writer Nina Popova that took place in the Sverdlovsk regional organization of the Union of Soviet Writers and at the Moscow regional seminar of prose writers, as well as to the analysis of the text of the story. © 2021 Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of RAS. All rights reserved.