Authors

David Gillespie¹; Marina Korneeva¹;  ¹ Personal capacity, Russian Federation

Discussion

This paper examines the work of the Russian Tartar author Guzel' Iakhina, whose first novel, Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza, published in 2015, won several prizes and established the author as a mainstream writer in post-Soviet Russian literature, Her chosen themes, however, have ensured that she has both allies and enemies in the cultural world of Vladimir Putin's Russia She has subsequently published two more novels, Deti moi, in 2018 and Eshelon na Samarkand, in 2021. She is the recipient of several Russian and international prizes. Iakhina's novels and short stories offer an incisive and often harrowing analysis of Soviet history, from the early 1920s and the aftermath of the Civil War, through to dekulakization and the collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Her novels are based on archival documents, and thus the aspiration to create narratives rooted in historical fact is paramount, and common to all three novels. Historical verisimilitude, however, is not the only criterion in Iakhina's picture of the world. Moreover, the array of literary frames of reference offer significant areas of signification for the discerning reader. These include in Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza the treatment of collectivization and dekulakization, as represented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (written 1958-1968, published 1973) as a crime against humanity, but flaunted as a progressive and ultimately successful social experiment in Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned (1932-1960). We note that both authors received the Nobel Prize for Literature, though on polar opposites of the political and cultural landscape. Deti moi is set in the Volga German community, with a narrative that revolves around characters with names such as Bach and Hoffman. Eshelon na Samarkand is set in the immediate post-Civil War period and recounts the resettlement of 500 orphans from Kazan' to Central Asia by train, itself a potent symbol of both disruption and progress in Russian and Soviet literature (the novels Anna Karenina and Doktor Zhivago to name but two). The motif that unites all three novels, and Iakhina;s published short stories, is the fate and the suffering of children, a theme going back to Dostoevskii and referenced in Soviet literature in the work of Kornei Chukovskii, Sergei Rozanov, Viktor Dragunskii and Arkadii Gaidar. This paper proposes to examine the trope of childhood suffering in the works of Iakhina within the context of the 'childhood theme' in Russian and Soviet literature, and to locate it within the literary interrogation of Russia history offered by Iakhina's contemporaries Zakhar (real name Evgenii) Prilepin, Petr Aleshkovskii and Evgenii Vodolazkin. We pose the question: are Iakhina;s children symbols of hope for the future, or simply tragic victims of its history?