Literature about peasant life has always been prominent in the Soviet Union, and some of the most interesting writers – such as Boris Pilnyak, Leonid Leonov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Andrei Platonov, and Aleksandr Tvardovsky – have devoted themselves to countryside themes. Under Stalin, however, both the aesthetic value and the social integrity of village literature were largely vitiated by the demands of socialist realism. There were exceptions, notably the first volume of Sholokhov's novel about the forced collectivization of agriculture, Virgin Soil Upturned (1931). But by the beginning of the 1950s village literature had been almost completely reduced to state propaganda.

In the decade following World War II, writing on rural themes tended to be hortatory, designed to promote discipline and enthusiasm for the painful sacrifices involved in restoring agriculture after the war's devastation. At the same time, it painted an artificially rosy picture of the countryside. The narrator of Kazakov's story “Nestor and Kir” sarcastically recalls: