Writers as Politicians: Multinational Soviet Literature during Perestroika and in the 1990s

• In Event: Soviet Multinational Literature: Between Identity Politics and the Discourse of Empire

Abstract

This paper will analyze the disintegration of the institution of the multinational Soviet literature since the latter half of the 1980s and the first years after its collapse in the 1990s. More specifically, it focuses on the main topic: how and why Soviet writers, among them conspicuously many representatives of the Soviet national literatures, entered the state's national politics and local activism. It explores how this transgression arose from the ideology and ethics of the multinational Soviet literature. It is a curious legacy of socialist education and a continuation of the traditions of local literary institutions in the Soviet Union, which fulfilled varied political, pedagogical, and memorial functions beyond literature. At the same time, since the Thaw time, the authors who created national versions of the multinational Soviet literature already possessed an instrument for post-Soviet anti-imperial politics, resulting in liberation and (often) nationalist resentment.

Author

• Klavdia Smola, U of Dresden (Germany)