Late and Post Soviet Russian Literature

The second volume of Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature: A Reader treats the literature of the Thaw and Stagnation periods (1954-1986). It includes translations of poetry and prose as well as scholarly texts that provide additional material for discussion. The goal of this volume is to present the range of ideas, creative experiments, and formal innovations that accompanied the social and political changes of the late Soviet era. Together with the introductory essays and biographical notes, the texts collected here will engage all students and interested readers of late Soviet Russian literature.

The second volume of Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature: A Reader treats the literature of the Thaw and Stagnation periods (1954-1986). It includes translations of poetry and prose as well as scholarly texts that provide additional material for discussion. The goal of this volume is to present the range of ideas, creative experiments, and formal innovations that accompanied the social and political changes of the late Soviet era. Together with the introductory essays and biographical notes, the texts collected here will engage all students and interested readers of late Soviet Russian literature.

Acknowledgments 9 Part I: Literature of the Thaw Introduction 15 Nikita Khrushchev 25 From “Speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU” 25 Pyotr Vail’ and Alexander Genis 43 From The Sixties: The World of the Soviet Man 44 Physicists and Lyricists. Science 44 Laughter Without Cause. Humor 52 Who Is to Blame? Dissidence 57 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 70 Robert Porter From Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 72 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn From The Gulag Archipelago Chapter 10. Behind the Wire the Ground Is Burning 84 Chapter 12. The Forty Days of Kengir 91 Varlam Shalamov 109 On Prose 111 Eulogy 127 Vasily Grossman 144 From Forever Flowing 146 Vladimir Tendryakov 169 Bread for a Dog 170 Yulii Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) 193 This Is Moscow Speaking 194 Andrey Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) 234 Dissent as a Personal Experience 236 Poetry of the 1960s 254 Yevgeny Yevtushenko 255 Babii Yar 256 The Heirs of Stalin 259 The Execution of Stenka Razin (From Bratsk Hydroelectric Station) 262 Interview with Yevgeny Yevtushenko 268 Andrei Voznesensky 282 Antiworlds 283 Parabolic Ballad 285 Ballad of 1941 287 The Triangular Pear 288 Alexander Galich 291 Behind Seven Fences 292 Lenochka 294 To the Memory of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak 298 Comrades, I’ll tell you like it is 301 Vassily Aksyonov 302 From A Mysterious Passion 304 Part II: Literature of the Stagnation Introduction 335 Alexei Yurchak 341 Living “Vnye”: Deterritorialized Milieus 341 Joseph Brodsky 359 Less Than One 361 Selected Poems 385 Letters to a Roman Friend 385 May 24, 1980 388 The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn 389 Andrei Bitov 393 From Pushkin House 394 Yurii Dombrovsky 399 Little Arm, Leg, Cucumber . . . 401 Neo-Classical Poetry 421 Aleksandr Kushner 422 No, not one face, but two: the world 423 Someone’s crying all night 424 We don’t get to choose our century 425 As at every doorstep grow rowan and maple 426 Pan 427 Memoirs 428 Before the War: Recollections 429 Lev Losev 430 “I know, the Mongol yoke, the years of famine 431 I used to work for Campfire. In that dreary place 432 At a Geneva Watchmaker’s 434 Bakhtin in Saransk 435 Grammar is indeed the god of the mind 437 Amphibronchic Night 438 The house 439 A poet is compost, in him dead words 440 Near the lake, where one can easily drown 441 Cloth (doctoral dissertation) 443 Elena Shvarts 446 The Dump 447 The Invisible Hunter 448 Elegy on an X-ray Photo of my Skull 449 “I was born with an unlined palm” 451 Orpheus 452 Viktor Krivulin 454 From the cycle “Anniversary Verses” 455 Trash 455 Where Is Our New Tolstoy? 455 The Millennium Changing Shifts 456 From Metropol’ 458 Vladimir Vysotsky 461 Wolf Hunt 462 Bathhouse Blues 464 Parody of a Bad Detective Story 466 Dialogue 469 Yuz Aleshkovsky 472 Lesbian Song 473 Cigarette Butt 474 Personal Meeting 476 Genrikh Sapgir 478 A Voice 479 Radioblab 481 Monkey 483 Viktor Erofeev 485 The Metropol’ Affair 487 Sergei Dovlatov 502 The Performance 504 Evgeny Kharitonov 529 “How I Found Out”: One Boy’s Story 530 Flysheet 537 Venedikt Erofeev 540 Olga Sedakova 541 Remembering Venedikt Erofeev 542 Mikhail Epshtein 560 From “Charms of Entropy” 561 Dmitry A. Prigov 574 Selected poems from Texts of Our Life 576 Selected poems from Written Between 1975 and 1989 581 Vladimir Shinkarev 585 From Mit’ki 586