Authors
Dave Weller1; 1 University of Exeter, UK Discussion
The alignment of socialist realism to the exigencies of a post-War and Cold War Soviet Union was formalised by Zhdanov’s infamous doctrine in 1946. Two Jewish writers, Ida Nappelbaum and Olga Ziv, students of Nikolai Gumilev in the early 1920s whose subsequent careers had taken divergent paths, responded in ways they believed would accord with dictums for a reimagined representation of patriotism and industrial reconstruction. Forced by penury, Nappelbaum produced her most conformist poetry, along with ocherki and short stories, and was published for the first time in nearly twenty years. Ziv decided to abandon journalism and write a novel set in an iron and steel works where the plot revolves around an innovative method for the reconstruction of a blast furnace. However, the vagaries of the literary and political establishment meant both writers’ loyalty was misplaced. Ziv’s novel was pilloried, then re-written, and became part of the canon of what critics labelled the ‘misguided production theme’; her literary output never fully recovered. Nappelbaum initially suffered a worse fate, being sent to the Gulag despite her displays of artistic allegiance, but whilst imprisoned reinvigorated her youthful lyricism to establish a unique poetic voice. 
