The Individual After Stalin: Writers, Diaries, and the Reform of Soviet Socialism

• Books & Literature
• History

Anatoly Pinsky, a writer in residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study and adjunct assistant professor at the City College of New York, will present an overview of his book project, The Individual after Stalin: Writers, Diaires, and the Reform of Soviet Socialism.  Pinsky’s study examines an ideal of individuality formulated by reformist writers in the Khrushchev-era USSR, and casts its popular embrace as the primary imperative of so-called de-Stalinization.  The project centers on the writers’ use of their diaries to model themselves after the ideal, and on their publication of diaristic literature to disseminate it. The ideal demanded that the Soviet citizen closely examine and come to independent conclusions about Soviet reality, practices the diary form captured better than other literary genres.  Writers argued that the Soviet citizen, having created socialism and defended it in World War II, had grown up; he could be trusted to form and express his own opinions even if they contradicted those of the Communist Party leadership.  The trouble, of course, was that the leadership never gave the Soviet citizen the autonomy he desired.  Thus, what the diaries reveal, alongside a redefinition of wht it meant to be an individual, is how hard it was to live up to the standard, a difficulty no less modern than Soviet.