"In the Middle of the Contrast": Andrei Bitov and the Act of Writing in the Contemporary World

Abstract

temporary Russian writer Andrei Bitov,1 say, one could, for example, place him in his historical and cultural context that is, one could place him within the context of Soviet culture, society, and history. One could discuss the way in which he, like others of his generation, came to maturity at the time of the loosening up of society that came with the death of Stalin and the proclamation by Khrushchev, in 1956, of the de-Stalinization of Soviet society. This generation, the so-called children of the Twentieth Party Congress, learned to be freer than the generation of its parents had been. In literature the postStalin thaw era saw, among other tendencies, the emergence of writing that was centered in the literary journal Iunosf (Youth). Youth prose featured urban, rebellious youth enamored of Western culture, style, and music (often jazz). Vassily Aksyonov's novel Zvezdnyi bilet (1961; Eng. A Ticket to the Stars)2 contained youthful protagonists whose attitudes and actions linked them to their distant American brother Holden Caulfield, the major character in J. D. Salinger's influential novel The Catcher in the Rye.3 Youth prose, including some of Bitov's earliest stories of the 1950s and early 1960s, often portrayed less-than-perfect whose individual subjective realities and less-than-perfect lives were a far cry from the objective depictions of reality and the positive heroes required in socialist-realist literature, the type of literature that had been prescribed in the Soviet Union since the early years of the Stalin era. Many of the youth-prose writers, like Bitov and Aksyonov, later went on to develop their own unique literary voices.