2025 Theses Doctoral

Modernist Poets After Stalin: The Late Styles of Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Zabolotsky

Gushchin, Veniamin

Мy dissertation reconstructs the fate of Russian modernism after its “prohibition” and the establishment of socialist realism through three case studies. My protagonists developed recognizable “early styles” in the broadly defined modernist period (1890-1934), survived Stalinism, and experienced an aesthetic shift in their poetic careers in the 1930s-40s, developing a self-consciously late style in the 1940s-60s.

Most famous for the Nobel Prize scandal around Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak began his poetic career as a Futurist before breaking with the avant-garde and seeking “unheard simplicity.” Anna Akhmatova moved from confessional miniatures to intertextually dense, long poems, becoming a self-appointed embodiment of Russian cultural memory. Nikolai Zabolotsky was a founding member of the avant-gardist collective OBERIU, subsequently spending eight years in the Gulag system before becoming an official Soviet poet of philosophical nature lyrics, a trajectory interpreted by some critics as an aesthetic capitulation to socialist realism.

In addition to critically interrogating the notion of late style and its function in literary historiography, I challenge Cold War narratives around the end of modernism by emphasizing its continuity within the later careers of my poets and within Soviet culture itself. I refer to these Cold War narratives as the “late modernist consensus,” the view that Russian modernism ends in a quiet neo-traditionalism. I examine the role of all three of my protagonists to the formation for this “consensus.” My dissertation makes a case for the category of Soviet late modernism as the new pragmatic contexts for my protagonists in the early post-Stalinist period.