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A Soviet Union: The Personal Correspondence of Stalin-Era Graduate Students in Love, 1945-1953

08 May 2017, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Anatoly Pinsky…

Event Information

Location

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)