Writing the Nation After Stalin: Literature and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

In 1967, the Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, 'Looking back, even a fool would have been able to predict it today: the Soviet regime could certainly have been breached only by literature.' In Writing the Nation after Stalin, Erin Hutchinson tells the story of a multiethnic cohort of young Soviet writers from villages who set out to remedy a social injustice--the oppression of the peasantry under Stalin--and ended up challenging the Soviet state.Their literary works, published within the official system, praised national values and traditional village culture and helped fuel a resurgence of ethno-nationalism in the USSR.In the late 1980s, several village writers became leaders in the nationalist movements that helped trigger the break-up of the Soviet Union. In a communist country that prided itself on being 'the most well-read in the world', literature was always political.But how was it possible to publish literary works that challenged Marxist-Leninist ideol