Authors

Maria Hristova¹;  ¹ Lewis & Clark College, United States

Discussion

This paper examines the environmental themes in the works of a number of established writers, such as Leonid Leonov’s Russian Forest (1959), Vladimir Tendriakov’s Amidst the Forest (1953), and Vera Babich’s Mistress of the Forest (1964), in the post-Stalinist period. At a time when food shortages and ineffectual land management prompted new large-scale agrarian reforms, the prevailing interest in ecological topics in the Khrushchev era became a means of conceptualizing and critically examining reality while staying within the bounds of socialist realism. Environmental themes became crucial to Soviet authors because they provided a safe means of raising objections to the state’s economic goals by depicting the large gap between socialist ideals and lived reality. While the writers of the so-called “village prose” movement have received significant scholarly attention, their more prominent, state-supported counterparts during the Khrushchev era remain virtually unexamined from an environmental perspective. My analysis of the selected works is informed by Vladimir Kaganskii’s concept of environmental crises as a cultural product. I will focus on how these writers conceptualize the environment in relation to the people inhabiting it, their use of natural resources, as well as to the state as a whole, and on whether they alter, in any way, the profoundly anthropocentric Soviet worldview.