In recent years the term “Soviet literature” has become an increasingly awkward one. Soviet authorities insist that a monolithic, multinational literature has been created, embracing all the peoples of the Soviet Union, including numerous minority linguistic and ethnic groups. Nearly all of the noteworthy literature in the USSR, however, has been written in the Russian language.

It can be argued, moreover, that the community of good writing has become so disorganized and fragmented that the term Soviet literature is virtually meaningless. If one is to accept official judgments from the Soviet government, for example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn can no longer be termed a Soviet writer. Many others have gradually been excluded, and we are now faced with a situation in which a great deal of the most interesting writing in the Soviet Union is not published there. Numerous writers living in the USSR, such as Vladimir Voinovich, have had to resort to foreign publication of their best works. But are these works not Soviet literature? Likewise, are we to consider the works of such persons as Nadezhda Mandelstam and Andrei Amalrik, who have only been published abroad, as being beyond the scope of Soviet literature? Finally, what do we call the writing of such persons as Solzhenitsyn, Viktor Nekrasov, and Naum Korzhavin, who are now in exile? Did it cease to be Soviet literature the moment they crossed the border?

If all of these questions are answered in the affirmative, what remains is that which is currently published in Soviet books and periodicals, and it immediately becomes evident that this remainder is largely a literature of pretense, if only because it is heavily screened and censored, and governed by complex and crippling inhibitions and prohibitions.