Тhe Birth of Soviet Underground Culture in the 1930s

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the underground culture of the Stalinist 1930s, focusing on the literary corpus that formed the core of the samizdat canon of the late Soviet period. Readers in the 1960 and 1970s produced and circulated illegal copies of works by a veritable “who’s who” of early Soviet culture, including Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem (1934–1963); Isaac Babel’s short stories, Evgenii Zamiatin’s We (1920–1921); Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Before Sunrise (1935–1942); poems by Nikolai Gumilev, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Osip Mandelstam; Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur (1926–1928) and The Foundation Pit (1930), and even Maxim Gorky’s Untimely Thoughts (1918), a taboo work by the “father of Socialist Realism” himself. Ultimately, texts like Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1928–1940) and Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna attest to the blurriness of the concept of the “underground” in the 1930s.