The Myth of Stalingrad in Soviet Literature, 1942-1963

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2018-03

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Abstract

This study explores representations of the Battle of Stalingrad in Soviet literature between 1942 and 1963, asking how Stalingrad became central to Russian identity in this period. The work reads Stalingrad’s cultural significance within a body of scholarship on Soviet subjectivity and memory of the Second World War. My analysis begins with a survey of frontline newspaper stories, including material by Konstantin Simonov and previously unstudied stories by Vasily Grossman, which characterized the battle in eschatological terms. I then explore efforts to encode Stalingrad in epic form immediately following the battle and further chart how the story became a vehicle for Stalin’s deification in the late 1940s by comparing Il’ia Ehrenburg’s novel The Storm and minor works. I then show how Grossman’s For a Just Cause links wartime and Stalinist motifs. Finally, I uncover how Simonov and Grossman rewrote Stalingrad during the Khrushchev period. Simonov’s Not Born Soldiers suggested Stalingrad was a resurrection that could be repeated in the present; Grossman’s Life and Fate disrupted the epic wholeness of the Stalingrad myth with polyphony. Drawing on Frank Kermode’s work on myth, I read representations of Stalingrad as being imbued with kairotic significance for a Russian nation attached to an historicist view of the world. This sense of kairos encouraged readers to sublimate their sense of self with History. The victory’s “resurrection” of the nation provided the people and the regime with a new raison-d’être in the post-war years. For both, Stalingrad promised to resolve Soviet literature’s struggle to illustrate an epic present, and formed a shared identity around memory of the battle. I use Pierre Nora’s work on lieux de mémoire as an analytical framework to trace Stalingrad’s entry into national memory and the subsequent fluctuations in the battle’s representation throughout the wartime, Stalinist and Khrushchev-era presents. The flexibility and externality of the lieu as a means to preserve and recycle collective memory overcame contradictions inherent in the idea of experiencing kairos in the present. Whether invoked to deify or deconstruct Stalin, Stalingrad was the discursive centre for Soviet discussion of the past.

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Grossman, memory, myth, Soviet, Stalingrad, war

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Creative Commons

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