Authors

Marina Korneeva¹;  ¹ Moscow City Pedagogical University, Russia, Russian Federation

Discussion

This proposal aims to explore one of the key issues in Russian politics today: nationalism and its impact on policy and psychology. To this end, political discourse within literary creativity will be analyzed; that is, literature as a foundation for a political ideology. The literary aspect is exemplified in the work of Vasilii Belov (1932-2012), and his influence on a later generation of writers, such as Zakhar Prilepin (b. 1975). Belov was one of the leading exponents of the ‘village prose’ movement in Soviet literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and acquired a respected international reputation for his lyrical depictions of the Russian village and countryside. Moreover, Belov mythologized the Russian village to the extent that the village becomes the symbol of a morally pure Russia. Between 1989 and 1991 he was a member of the USSR’s Supreme Soviet, and in 1990 became a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In these years he became an outspoken critic of glasnost and pro-democracy forces, statements which were often accompanied by nationalistic and anti-Semitic statements. Unlike other ‘village writers’ of his generation, Belov’s later work took a trajectory into aggressive nationalism, where literary creativity assumed second place to the propagation of his ideological and political convictions. The innovative nature of this research lies in its exploration of a particular nationalistic political discourse in the modern Russian (ie post-Soviet) context. The fundamental question to be addressed is: what contribution did the writer Vasilii Belov make to the modern Russian picture of the world?