Iurii Trifonov and the Perils of Dokumental’nost’

• In Event: Documentary Devices in Soviet Literature of the Thaw Period and Beyond

Abstract

While critics praise Iurii Trifonov’s fiction of the Brezhnev years, few discuss his fraught relationship with dokumental’nost’ in the 1960s. This shapes The Bonfire’s Glow (Otblesk kostra, 1965), a documentary novel about his father. The Bonfire’s Glow has a fictional counterpart: The Old Man (Starik, 1976). In writing this later work Trifonov had the same worry as with The Bonfire’s Glow: how can an author depict the past with sincerity (iskrennost’) without description being directed by the historical events he portrays?

Author

• Benjamin Massey Sutcliffe, Miami U of Ohio