The readers of "Novyi mir," 1945--1970
Subtitle: twentieth-century experience and Soviet historical consciousness.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 518
Description: This work examines how several generations of Soviet readers remembered, forgot, imagined, and explained major events in Russia's 20th-century history. Based primarily on readers' letters to Novyi mir, the leading Soviet literary journal, the dissertation begins in the late Stalin years but focuses on the 1950s and 1960s---the decades of massive political and cultural transformations known as "the Thaw." Through a study of readers' responses to literature, an activity of traditionally major importance in Russian culture, this work explores Soviet intellectual history, focusing on historical consciousness, arguably a central category for analyzing post-Stalin intellectual developments. As its major problem, the dissertation studies the readers' efforts to cope with the legacy of the Stalin terror.Although the Thaw manifested new opportunities and much enthusiasm for political self-expression, the readers' social reasoning in the mid-late 1950s was still dominated by political ideas formed during the previous decades. At the same time, the literary-political debates of the late 1950s revealed generational gaps in understanding the country's past and contributed to the growth of deep-seated historical anxieties. While readers of the older generations tended to defend their ideals of Sovietness, defining them largely by loyalty to the Revolution, younger readers proved less adamant about the historical foundations of the existing order.Significant changes in readers' perceptions of the Soviet past and contemporary realities took place in the 1960s, primarily due to the polemic about the Stalin terror, a debate that at the time became not only widespread but also relatively open and legitimate. With much of their own to remember about the recent mass extermination of human lives, many readers took to heart the official disavowal of the terror and stood by the idea of leaving the terror behind, reacting forcefully against any political manifestations that suggested the possibility of the terror coming back. Official efforts to re-impose ideological orthodoxy in the late 1960s proved largely unsuccessful among this increasingly sophisticated, critically minded audience. It was due to the discussions about the terror that, during the 1960s, many fundamental notions and myths of the existing ideological and cultural order began to crumble.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3773.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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