Апология сталинизма в постсоветских учебниках литературы

Логос. 2017. № 5 (120). С. 65–86.

Pavlovets M.

The article is devoted to the apology of Joseph Stalin and Stalinism in a number of post-Soviet literature textbooks. Their authors had a generally positive assessment of Stalin’s role, not only as the head of the Soviet state, but also as the “modera- tor” of the literary process in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s personal evaluation of con- crete writers and their literary efforts - as well as, to some degree, the attitudes of these authors towards this Father of Nations - became an important factor in theirinclusion into the classroom canon of textbooks or, on the contrary, discredited and excluded them from it. The authors of these books carefully selected and reinter- preted the facts to emphasize Stalin’s exceptional importance for the development of 20th century Russian literature. Thus, Stalin appeared as the most important fig-ure of the literary process of the Soviet period, and the single method of Soviet liter- ature which was being approved during his reign - “socialist realism” - as a natural extension and embodiment of humanistic traditions of Russian literary classics.In Soviet school textbooks, there is an attempt to create a concept of the history of the 20th century Russian literature on the ideological basis of the late Soviet “soil- bound” conservatism, and to conceptualize Stalinism as the natural continuation of pre-revolutionary political-ideological conservatism. Thus, the school subject “lit- erature” is used as an ideological tool to indoctrinate the younger generation witha “national-patriotic” spirit. Moreover, this ideological line persisted in textbooks throughout the 1990s and 2000s with almost no adjustment, while their distribution was preferentially maintained by government agencies.

Keywords: Сталин, советская литература, позднесоветский консерватизм, Stalin, late soviet conservatism, soviet literature, literature textbooks, scholastic literature canon, учебники литературы, школьный литературный канон