Vasily Aksyonov Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Priscilla Meyer

SOURCE: "Aksenov and Soviet Literature of the 1960s," in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 6, Fall, 1973, pp. 446-60.

In the following essay, Meyer discusses several of Aksyonov's works and comments on the author's place in the "Young Prose" movement in Russian literature.

After Stalin's death Soviet literature had no rich indigenous tradition to proceed from directly, but there was a wide variety of elements, both Russian and Western, from which a new synthesis could be drawn. The first change that took place after 1953 broadened the range of permissible subject matter, and the first Thaw produced a rash of stories attacking bureaucratization. Subsequently, translations of contemporary Western literature (the journal Foreign Literature began publishing in 1955) and later the republication of Russian literature of the first third of this century (Blok in 1963, Olesha, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak in 1965, Bely in 1966, Balmont in 1969) provided material for stylistic innovation....
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