Like most people, my introduction to Russian literature was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I was 16. It was intense, incomprehensible without the Cliff Notes. It would take me years just to learn how to spell his name.
In 1849, Dostoyevsky was arrested with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary group of idealists who opposed censorship and serfdom. In fear of the 1848 revolutions that brought down the monarchies of Denmark and France spreading to Russia, Nicholas I condemned the prisoners to death. It was a mock execution, and Dostoyevsky was exiled to four years of hard labor to Siberia instead. Disfigured and epileptic, this experience would haunt him for the rest of his life, but it strengthened his ideals. He wrote Crime and Punishment after his release.
Of course, Dostoyevsky was not the first nor the last to be persecuted in the Soviet Union’s long history of censorship.
In 1823, Alexander Pushkin would be exiled for his outspoken commitment to social reform. His poems were included in the December uprisings that were quickly quelled by the government – the same one that would keep even stricter control over his writing. Unable to publish at will, many of his works would take years to reach the public and were always censored. The original version of his most famous play, Boris Godunov, would not be premiered until just recently in 2007, 170 years after his death. Today, he is considered to be Russia’s greatest poet and founder of its modern literature.
In 1905, Yevgeny Zamyatin was arrested and exiled twice. Yet he continued to write political satires, criticize the Communist Party and contribute to several Marxist newspapers. In 1923, a manuscript of We was smuggled into the U.S. where it was translated, published, and re-smuggled back into the Soviet Union in 1927. He was then blacklisted, but We would inspire generations of authors and novels, like George Orwell’s 1984 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano.
With the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Nabokov was forced to flee from St. Petersburg, a move that was meant to be temporary. Following the Civil War of 1921, his father – a member of the exiled Democratic Party – was assassinated in Berlin. Lenin’s rise to absolute power in 1924 meant that Nabokov could never return. His books were only published and sold abroad. Most famous for Lolita, it’s Invitation to a Beheading that became his own favorite work. In the novel, the main character is condemned to death for an imaginary crime. It is an absurd story of masquerading executioners and visitors, an attack on the irrationality of totalitarian rule. Nabokov would be a lifelong advocate for individual liberties and free speech around the world.
In 1921, Mikhail Bulgakov gave up medicine to become a writer. Because Stalin happened to like one of his plays, he was given a post at the Moscow Art Theater. He was denied permission to leave when his family moved to Western Europe. Initially, his novels, plays and comics were well-received. But as Soviet policies became more constricting, his manuscripts were confiscated, and after 1927, nothing of Bulgakov would be published until after his death. Among them The Master and Margarita – a metaphor of the government’s destructive relationship with its writers. It is considered a masterpiece amongst all Russian literary masterpieces.
After serving as a commander in the Red Army, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in 1945 for derogatory remarks he made against Stalin. Accused of anti-Soviet propaganda, he was arrested, beaten, interrogated, and imprisoned for 8 years in the labor camps. During the Khrushchev thaw, he was exonerated, and an edited version of One Day in the Life Ivan Denisovich was allowed to be published in 1963, the first piece of literature published in the Soviet Union that represented free speech. It was a harrowing emotional account of his experience at the gulag. Under the succeeding government, however, the KGB confiscated his manuscripts and his other works were denied publication. The manuscripts for the Gulag Archipelago had to be hidden and sent to Paris in secret where it was published. He was then exiled.
Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the state library in Moscow had collected over 27,000 books that were banned. But against the tyranny of time and politics, these authors wrote on in secret, many of them memorizing what they had written before destroying them. In their minds they built an indestructible library.
