A Soviet Union: The Personal Correspondence of Stalin-Era Graduate Students in Love, 1945-1953
08 May 2017, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm
Event Information
Location
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UCL Engineering Front Executive Suite 103, Engineering front building, Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7JE
Professor Anatoly Pinsky
This paper – a draft
chapter of Anatoly’s book project, “Soviet Individuality: A Study of Self and
Form” – examines how the genres of the familiar and love letter shaped, and
were shaped by, the subjectivities of their authors in the late Stalin era.
The
bulk of the analysis is devoted to some one-hundred letters exchanged between
two graduate students in Russian literature, Fedor Abramov (later a famous
writer of Russian village prose) and his wife Liudmila Krutikova (later one of
the first Soviet critics to study the émigré author and Nobel laureate Ivan
Bunin). The paper aims to theorize the meaning of the familiar and love letter
as forms in Soviet history. It also offers conclusions on what the content of
Abramov’s and Krutikova’s letters reveals about the evolution of subjectivities
and official discourse in the mid-century Soviet Union.
A seminar hosted by
the UCL SSEES Russian Studies Seminar Series.
Convenors: Philippa Hetherington (UCL SSEES) and Simon Huxtable (Loughborough)