Politics and Letters: The ‘Soviet Literary Controversy’ in Britain

Abstract

In the course of the so-called Soviet Literary Controversy of 1946, ‘decadent’ writers were expelled from the Writers' Union and cosmopolitan literary journals were closed down. The Controversy was widely reported in the British media and provoked extensive debate across literary periodicals. This article revisits this moment, paying particular attention to responses from John Lewis, J. B. Priestley, Cyril Connolly and the young Raymond Williams. Recovering the Controversy yields a new level of detail about the politico-cultural realignments of the mid 1940s by challenging the sometimes hindering period frames—the thirties, the forties, the war, the Cold War, the Old Left, the New Left—through which mid-century cultural history is most usually mapped and viewed.