Authors

Discussion

The Soviet Union, as Tomas Lahusen has pointedly stated, “was not only a country of readers but also a country of writers.” It is especially true for the pre-war Stalinist times, marked by intense political and institutional management of literature, which aimed to manufacture the writer as the key cultural agent – the proverbial “engineer of human souls.” Young people who went to school in the 1930s were exposed to heavily ideologised literary induction, which framed not only texts themselves but also their authors’ biographies as indispensable sources of moral guidance and inspiration. Many of those students, taking life lessons from Russian and contemporary Soviet classics, wished to replicate their life trajectories and pursue a writing career. 

This paper looks into several diaries of male teenagers who made their first attempts at literary craft, analysing their ideas about what it meant to be a writer and what good writing entailed. I specifically zoom in on boys as the writers’ promotion as role models was exclusively masculine, both regarding the gender composition of the literary pantheon and the hailed character traits. I mostly discuss the diarists’ critical assessments of and comments on their works, but I briefly touch upon the writings, specifically poems, as well. 

I examine the complicated dynamics between talent (natural predisposition to creativity) and practice (studying of acclaimed works) that dominated their ruminations. These teenagers believed that a successful writer had to possess the ability to “feel life” or to “feel the times,” which paradoxically had to be both inherent to one’s personality and learnt through self-discipline. I explore how this dialectic was premised on multiple – and often contradictory – ideological tenets of Stalinism, including the concepts of “consciousness” [soznatel’nost’] and spontaneity [stikhiinost’], the cult of heroes, and the Socialist realist principles of truthfulness [pravdivost’], the knowledge of life [znanie zhizni], and learning from the classics [ucheba u klassikov]. 

I argue that the logical dilemma between “being” and “becoming” a writer that aspiring teenagers encountered gives us important insight into the workings of the Stalinist self, liberating and entrapping at the same time.