Двухпартийная организация и двухпартийная литература?: Политическое воображение советских писателей и становление позднесоветской культурной парадигмы (конец 1956 – начало 1957 гг.)

Abstract

The article shows that in 1953–1956, Nikita Khrushchev and other members of the KPSU Central Committee tried to regulate ideological and aesthetic diversity in Soviet literature. During these years, horizontal connections began to resume between writers and critics who held different views, but shared hopes for the regeneration of literature. This process of spontaneous social organization became especially intense in the period between the Twentieth Congress of the KPSU and the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The article offers a contextualized interpretation of a previously unknown archival document – minutes of the meeting of the Bureau of the Section for the Literature of Children and Youth of the Soviet Writers’ Union (December 7, 1956). The minutes provide a telling snapshot of the expectations and hopes of both conservative and conformist groups of Soviet writers. They show that these were not only “liberals” but also their opponents in the section who in 1956 considered some form of institutionalization of the competition between those more conservative and those more critical toward the regime groups in Soviet literature. Yet, institutional diversification took another path.