Gor'ky,glasnost'andPerestroika: The death of a cultural superhero?

Abstract

publicised policies of glasnost' and perestroika have resulted in changes of a magnitude that no one would have even dreamt possible a mere five years ago. These changes have been nowhere more spectacular than in Soviet literary life. Who could have predicted that in 1991 we would be surveying a scene in which the previously unthinkable has become a simple fact of life? The publication of such works as Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, of Zamyatin's We, of Platonov's Foundation Pit; the great debates aroused by the novels of Grossman, Aitmatov and Rybakov; the re-evaluation of the works of the Russian emigres (most notably Nabokov); the intense competition among journals and publishing houses to print Kafka and Joyce, Beckett and Camus-all of this amounts to an astonishing reversal, the full implications of which are only slowly becoming apparent. But one thing at least is clear: since the 1920s literary life in the Soviet Union has never been more interesting. When so many exciting things are happening in the world of Soviet letters, it may seem somewhat out of place to talk about Maksim Gor'ky. Gor'ky's name has hardly been headline-making material over the last couple of years, and there is probably even less chance that it is likely to be in the foreseeable future. Indeed, as one writer recently complained in Literaturnaya gazeta, there would appear to be 'no place for Gor'ky in the noisy celebration of returning names undertaken by our press'.1 These words were written in 1988, the 120th anniversary of Gor'ky's birth, an anniversary remarkable most of all for the fact that, by comparison with the