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Village Prose
Village Prose (russian: Деревенская проза, or Деревенская литература) was a movement in Soviet literature beginning during the Khrushchev Thaw, which included works that focused on the Soviet rural communities. Some point to the critical essays on collectivization in Novyi mir by Valentin Ovechkin as the starting point of Village Prose, though most of the subsequent works associated with the genre are fictional novels and short stories. Authors associated with Village Prose include Aleksander Yashin, Vasily Belov, Fyodor Abramov, Valentin Rasputin, Boris Mozhayev, Vasily Shukshin. Some critics also count Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn among the Village Prose writers for his short novel ''Matryona's Place''. Many Village Prose works espoused an idealized picture of traditional Russian village life and became increasingly associated with Russian nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Some have argued that the nationalist subtext of Village Prose is the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk ( Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR), and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over and spanning eleven time zones. The country's roots lay in the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system. Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity, became an atheist, and embraced Marxism–Leninism. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter. As a result of his experience in prison and the camps, he gradually became a philosophically-minded Eastern Orthodox Christian. As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russian Literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian language, Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the Age of Enlightenment, literature had grown in importance, and from the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry, prose and drama. Romanticism permitted a flowering of poetic talent: Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Prose was flourishing as well. Mikhail Lermontov was one of the most important poets and novelists. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Ivan Turgenev, who mastered both short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy soon became internationally renowned. Other important figures of Russian realism were Ivan Goncharov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nikolai Leskov. In the second h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vladimir Soloukhin
Vladimir Alexeyevich Soloukhin (russian: Влади́мир Алексе́евич Солоу́хин) (June 14, 1924 – April 4, 1997) was a Russian poet and writer. Biography Born in Alepino, a village in what is now in Sobinsky District, Vladimir Oblast, he was raised in a peasant family. He attended , where he studied to be a mechanic. At that time, he published his first poems in a local newspaper; ''Prizyv'' (The Call). After his military service, from 1942-1945 in the Kremlin guard, he began his serious literary career, and in 1951 graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. From 1958-1981, he worked in the editorial offices of the prominent newspaper '' Molodaya Gvardiya'' (''Young Guard'') and in the literary journal ''Nash Sovremennik'' (''Our Contemporary''). In articles he published during the second half of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, he manifested himself as a Russian patriot, and stressed the need to preserve national traditions; ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Viktor Astafyev
Viktor Petrovich Astafyev also spelled Astafiev or Astaf'ev (russian: Ви́ктор Петро́вич Аста́фьев; 1 May 1924 – 29 November 2001), was a Soviet and Russian writer, playwright and screenwriter. He was recognized with the title Hero of Socialist Labour in 1989. Biography Viktor Astafyev was born in the village of Ovsyanka (then Krasnoyarsk Uyezd, Yeniseysk Governorate, Russian SFSR) on the bank of the Yenisey river. His father, Pyotr Pavlovich Astafyev, was a son of a relatively rich mill-owner (a part-time hunter who most of his time though spent at home), mother Lydia Ilyinichna Astafyeva (née Potylitsyna) came from a peasant family. In his 2000 autobiography Viktor Astafyev remembered his father's household as a place where men, led by grandfather Pavel Yakovlevich, were on continuous binge, while all the work was being organized and done by two women, Lydia and her mother-in-law, Maria Osipova, Pavel Yakovlevich's young second wife.Rostovtsev, Yur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time Of Stagnation
The "Era of Stagnation" (russian: Пери́од засто́я, Períod zastóya, or ) is a term coined by Mikhail Gorbachev in order to describe the negative way in which he viewed the economic, political, and social policies of the Soviet Union that began during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982) and continued under Yuri Andropov (1982–1984) and Konstantin Chernenko (1984–1985). It is sometimes called the "Brezhnevian Stagnation" in English. Terminology During the period of Brezhnev's leadership, the term "Era of Stagnation" was not used. Instead Brezhnev used the term "period of developed socialism" (Russian: период развито́го социализма) for the period that started in 1971. This term stemmed from Khrushchev's promise in 1961 of reaching communism in 20 years. It was in the 1980s that the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev coined the term "Era of Stagnation" to describe the economic difficulties that developed when Leonid Brezhnev ruled ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Writers' Union
The Union of Soviet Writers, USSR Union of Writers, or Soviet Union of Writers (russian: Союз писателей СССР, translit=Soyuz Sovetstikh Pisatelei) was a creative union of professional writers in the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1934 on the initiative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1932) after disbanding a number of other writers' organizations, including Proletkult and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. The aim of the Union was to achieve party and state control in the field of literature. For professional writers, membership of the Union became effectively obligatory, and non-members had much more limited opportunities for publication. The result was that exclusion from the Union meant a virtual ban on publication. However, the history of the Union of Writers also saw cases of voluntary self-exclusion from its cadre. Thus, Vasily Aksenov, Semyon Lipkin, and Inna Lisnyanskaya left the Union of Writers in a show of solidarity aft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nationalist
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History''. Polity, 2010. pp. 9, 25–30; especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty ( self-governance) over its homeland to create a nation-state. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference ( self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on a combination of shared social characteristics such as culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics (or the government), religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solida ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russian Nationalism
Russian nationalism is a form of nationalism that promotes Russian cultural identity and unity. Russian nationalism first rose to prominence in the early 19th century, and from its origin in the Russian Empire, to its repression during early Bolshevik rule, and its revival in the Soviet Union, it was closely related to pan-Slavism. The definition of Russian national identity within Russian nationalism has been characterized in different ways. In ethnic terms one including asserting that those identified as ethnic Russians are the Russian nation, another is the All-Russian nation concept developed in the Russian Empire that views Russians as having three sub-national groups within it including Great Russians (those commonly identified as ethnic Russians today), Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians ( Belarusians). Russian nationalists have identified Russia as the main successor of the Kievan Rus' and typically view the arising of separate national identities of Bel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matryona's Place
''Matryona's Place'' (russian: link=no, Матрёнин двор), sometimes translated as ''Matryona's Home'' (or House), is a novella written in 1959 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. First published by Aleksandr Tvardovsky in the Russian literary journal ''Novy Mir'' in 1963, it is Solzhenitsyn's most read short story. The narrator, a former prisoner of the Gulag and a teacher of mathematics, has a longing to return to live in the Russian provinces and takes a job at a school on a collective farm. Matryona offers him a place to live in her tiny, run-down home, but he is told not to expect any "fancy cooking." They share a single room where they eat and sleep; the narrator sleeps on a camp-bed and Matryona near the stove. The narrator finds the farm workers' lives little different from those of the pre-revolutionary landlords and their serfs. Matryona works on the farm for little or no pay. She is forced to give a small annex of her home to a relative who wants to use the wood from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vasily Shukshin
Vasily Makarovich Shukshin (russian: Василий Макарович Шукшин; 25 July 1929 – 2 October 1974) was a Soviet Russian writer, actor, screenwriter and film director from the Altai region who specialized in rural themes. A prominent member of the Village Prose movement, he began writing short stories in his early teenage years and later transition to acting by his late 20s. Biography Vasiliy Makarovich Shukshin was born on 25 July 1929 to a peasant family of assimilated Moksha Mordvin origin in the village of Srostki near Biysk in Siberian Krai, Soviet Union (now in Altai Krai, Russia). In 1933, his father, Makar Leontievich Shukshin, was arrested and executed on the charges of participating in an "anti-kolkhoz plot" during the Soviet collectivization. He was only rehabilitated 23 years later, in 1956. His mother, Maria Sergeyevna (née Popova), had to look after the survival of the entire family. By 1943 Shukshin had finished seven years of village scho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Khrushchev Thaw
The Khrushchev Thaw ( rus, хрущёвская о́ттепель, r=khrushchovskaya ottepel, p=xrʊˈɕːɵfskəjə ˈotʲ:ɪpʲɪlʲ or simply ''ottepel'')William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, London: Free Press, 2004 is the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s when Political repression in the Soviet Union, repression and Censorship in the Soviet Union, censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and peaceful coexistence with other nations. The term was coined after Ilya Ehrenburg's 1954 novel ''The Thaw (Ehrenburg novel), The Thaw ''("Оттепель"), sensational for its time. The Thaw became possible after the Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary Khrushchev denounced former General Secretary Stalin in the On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, "Secret Speech" at the 20th Congres ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
