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In recent years we have seen an attempt to make differentiations within Soviet literature, to separate the "clean" from the "unclean". In the main, non-conformist writers are numbered among the ranks of the "clean": Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak and a few others. Such an approach is socio-political rather than scholarly. The truth is that the artistic intelligentsia of Russia on the whole accepted the revolution, for a variety of reasons, including traditional historical ones stemming from the mentality of the Russian intelligentsia, a mentality that prepared it to accept the idea of coercion, sacrifice, historical guilt before the people, and retribution. None the less the time came when the apparent monolith of Soviet literature began to self-destruct. In this chapter we are concerned with the process of self-destruction within the Soviet artistic mentality and not the destruction caused in the period of perestroika by the external pressure of incontrovertible facts about the bloody Stalinist past.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-22331-2_1

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