Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The literary situation
- 2 The oldest poets
- 3 The first Soviet generation of poets
- 4 Poets formed during the war
- 5 The younger generation of poets
- 6 The rise of short fiction
- 7 The youth movement in short fiction
- 8 The village writers
- 9 Literature reexamines the past
- 10 Literature copes with the present
- 11 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- 12 The art of Andrei Sinyavsky
- 13 Underground literature
- 14 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Acknowledgments to publishers
- Index
7 - The youth movement in short fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The literary situation
- 2 The oldest poets
- 3 The first Soviet generation of poets
- 4 Poets formed during the war
- 5 The younger generation of poets
- 6 The rise of short fiction
- 7 The youth movement in short fiction
- 8 The village writers
- 9 Literature reexamines the past
- 10 Literature copes with the present
- 11 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- 12 The art of Andrei Sinyavsky
- 13 Underground literature
- 14 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Acknowledgments to publishers
- Index
Summary
In the early 1960s it seemed that nearly every young Soviet writer of short stories was preoccupied with the conflict between his own generation and that of his parents. To some extent they were simply writing about a familiar psychological phenomenon that was by no means limited to this particular time and place – the feeling of young people that their parents represent an establishment that is trying to rob them of their individuality, to buy them out with communal protections. One of the teenagers in Vasili Aksenov's A Starry Ticket, talking to his older brother, puts it this way:
Your life, Victor, was devised by Papa and Mama when you were still in the cradle. A star in school, a star in college, graduate student, junior scientific worker, M.A., senior scientific worker, Ph.D., Member of the Academy, and then … a dead man, respected by all. Never once in your life have you made a truly important decision, never once taken a risk. To hell with it! We are scarcely born when everything has already been thought out for us, our future already decided. Not on your life! It's better to be a tramp and fail than to be a boy all your life, carrying out the decisions of others.
The “conflict between the generations,” however, also had more local and immediate aspects of both a moral and ideological nature. Living in the aftermath of Stalinism, young people realized that their parents had allowed themselves to be duped, cowed, and to some extent shaped by a regime that was now declared to have been badly tainted.
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- Information
- Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin , pp. 180 - 217Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1978