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Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) - Known for his novel and his poetry. He won the Nobel prize for Doctor Zhivago, but Soviet authorities condemned him for "committing a patently political act" against the Soviet state. Soviet writers, eager to maintaim their high-ranking positions, agreed with the slander, condemning him for "traitorous, anti-patriotic conduct". The public denunciation, the emotional torture and humiliation affected him deeply, and (knowing he would never be able to exist in the Soviet literary world if he did not do so) Pasternak renounced the prize. Americans, who fight tooth and nail for their freedoms, may find this hard to understand, but we must remember that conditions were terribly harsh for those who opposed the Soviet regime. His own contemporaries had been executed for less. Truly, the only thing that kept Pasternak from a more severe punishment- perhaps a death in the prison camps- was the strange, unexplainable devotion Josef Stalin held for this talented and distinguished writer.
Boris Pilnyak (1894-1937)- author of novels and short stories. Criticized in the late 1920's for unorthodox works and stylistic and typographical experimentation.* He disappeared in the purges. Later it was discovered that he was arrested in 1937, and died soon afterwards. His novels include The Volga Flows Down to the Caspian Sea, The Naked Year, and many stories, among them "Mahogany" and "Chinese Story".
Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1896-1951)- Short-story writer, member of a group that opposed proletarian literature in 1920's. Stories have folklore backgrounds. The heroes are concerned with religious and moral issues. He protested the depersonalization of man by machine.* His novel, The Foundation Pit, is written against collectivisation, and was written from Dec. 1929 to April 1930, at the height of Russia's attempt to form the ideal collectivised society. Sally Laird has written a great paper discussing his novel. He has also written various short stories, usually found under the title The Fierce and the Beautiful, and although the work is out of print, it can be found at most public libraries. Prospect, an electronic journal, has published an interesting article on Andrei Platonov, Venedikt Yerofeev, and Victor Pelevin. In the article, author Sally Laird wrote:
"In the last few months three new translations of Russian novels have arrived on my desk. Two of them are examples of what came to be known in the late 1980s as "delayed literature": works written decades earlier but left unpublished in Russia until the advent of glasnost. The third is the work of one of the most talented writers of the "post-Soviet" era, Victor Pelevin. Reading these novels in a row, I was struck by the story they tell of what has happened to Russian souls, and bodies, this century." - Sally Laird, Prospect
Alexander Pushkin - classic Russian poet and spinner of tales. Many authors were inspired by this 19th century predecessor, whose fairy tales and poetry have captivated the world.
* (This information was found in a publisher's note,following Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to the Congress of Soviet Writers", nestled in a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Bantam Books.)
