Evocations of Nekrasov’s trench prose in Elena Rzhevskaya’s novellas

Abstract

The article examines the unique characteristics of E. Rzhevskaya’s prose. In 1941–1945, Rzhevskaya was an army interpreter from German. In her analysis of Rzhevskaya’s biography and literary output, S. Perevalova shows the assimilation of the writer’s wartime experience in her oeuvre, which simultaneously follows the patterns of ‘lieutenant prose,’ typified by novellas of V. Nekrasov, Y. Bondarev and other contemporaries of Rzhevskaya’s, and the tradition of Russian classical writers of the 19th c. and the Silver Age. The first work of ‘lieutenant prose’ that invokes the classical tradition was V. Nekrasov’s In the Trenches of Stalingrad [V okopakh Stalingrada], a novella strongly defined by humanism and ties to classical Russian war prose. The author names Nekrasov as well as Lermontov and Blok as influences on Rzhevskaya’s creative method, her affinity with the two poets made stronger by their translations of German poetry which earned the status of classics. Thanks to her interest in Blok and Lermontov, a writer Rzhevskaya became acquainted with world culture, where German literature has long been prominently represented.