Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The War Theme in Poetry 1914–1941
- Chapter 2 Soviet Poetry 1941–1945: A Chronological Survey
- Chapter 3 Heroes and Leaders: Socialist Realism in Wartime Poetry
- Chapter 4 The Common Man
- Chapter 5 Women in Poetry and Women Poets
- Chapter 6 ‘No-one is Forgotten and Nothing is Forgotten’: The War in Post-war Poetry
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Soviet Poetry 1941–1945: A Chronological Survey
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The War Theme in Poetry 1914–1941
- Chapter 2 Soviet Poetry 1941–1945: A Chronological Survey
- Chapter 3 Heroes and Leaders: Socialist Realism in Wartime Poetry
- Chapter 4 The Common Man
- Chapter 5 Women in Poetry and Women Poets
- Chapter 6 ‘No-one is Forgotten and Nothing is Forgotten’: The War in Post-war Poetry
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There is, it could be argued, a good deal more variety in Soviet war poetry than in British poetry written at the same time. Co-existing within the Soviet poetry are solidly Stalinist propaganda pieces, bitter reflections on the selfishness of government officials and grimly realistic evocations of the battlefield. Over time, the versions of ‘Soviet war poetry’ presented by scholars in the USSR have differed according to political circumstances. After Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech denouncing Stalin's crimes, wartime poems which portrayed Stalin vanished from the canon. Some poems printed during the war which expressed hatred of the enemy in particularly forceful terms have either been altered or excluded from later publications. There have been many additions to the canon as a result of relaxations in censorship; the ‘privileged’ status of the war theme probably accelerated this process. Other works simply remained undiscovered for a time, for example poems found on the sites of former German concentration camps. Glasnost' made it possible to publish poems which gave a completely unvarnished picture of battle, as well as work which introduced the subject of Soviet labour camps, political repression and the abuse of privilege in wartime. Apart from written sources, the war produced a good deal of oral verse and song, some of which has been collected, but much of which has probably remained unrecorded.
Although it is now possible to discuss the broad range of wartime literary output, political circumstances in the former Soviet Union have meant that the literature of the Second World War, which was once a staple for uncontroversial research, has been largely dismissed as a relic of the discredited past.
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- Information
- Written with the BayonetSoviet Russian Poetry of World War Two, pp. 49 - 128Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1996