In summer 1961, a group of writers gathered in the small town of Tarusa, southwest of Moscow. The almanac that they compiled there, Tarusskie stranitsy (Pages from Tarusa; hereafter, Pages), came out in autumn 1961.Footnote 1 Its print-run was halted halfway through, and those responsible were punished by the central and local authorities.Footnote 2 Regardless of this curtailed publication—or partly, because of it—Pages was a “sensation” and “explosion” in Soviet literature.Footnote 3 “Pages doesn't look all that threatening,” contributor Vladimir Maksimov later observed, “but in 1961, it was a major event.”Footnote 4 Alongside Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which it pre-dated by a year, and two 1956 works associated with Pages’ chief editor Konstantin Paustovskii (the almanac Literaturnaia Moskva and Vladimir Dudintsev's novel Not by Bread Alone), Pages was a foundational moment of the Thaw. As its English translator Andrew Field explained, “it was the Tarusa writers…who, more than a year before Solzhenitsyn's celebrated novel, broke the first ground in the movement away from the Victorianism of Soviet literary language.”Footnote 5 The cultural significance of Pages has not faded in the six decades since publication, though its two post-Soviet sequels did not capture the zeitgeist in the same way.Footnote 6
More specifically, Pages introduced an array of mostly young writers who would stretch Socialist Realism in writing about youth, war, rural life, and morality: amongst them, Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Maksimov, Boris Balter and Vladimir Kornilov.Footnote 7 It also advanced the rehabilitation in print of figures silenced or repressed during Stalinism, with texts by and about Marina Tsvetaeva and the returnee poet Nikolai Zabolotskii, the poems of returnee Arkadii Shteinberg, and biographical sketches of the émigré Ivan Bunin and of Vsevolod Meyerhold (the latter written by the returnee Aleksandr Gladkov).Footnote 8 Additionally, the sketches under the byline Nadezhda Yakovleva were penned by Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam.
Despite this enduring fame, this landmark publication has been understood in general terms as epitomizing the spirit of the Thaw, or by extracting specific authors or literary texts out of the almanac's diverse stories, poetry, historical, biographical, and artistic works. The journalistic “sketches,” even by writers as talented as Mandel΄shtam, Paustovskii, and Frida Vigdorova, are widely assumed to be strategic, upping the dose of “officialese” relative to controversial elements.Footnote 9 Meanwhile, the substantial material about local museums and cultural figures, such as the artists Vasilii Polenov and Viktor Borisov-Musatov, has been largely overlooked; so too have most of the literary works by Tarusa and Kaluga authors such as Nikolai Panchenko, Vladimir Koblikov, and Galina Kornilova.Footnote 10
In fact, the almanac's diverse genres, themes and authors, and the multiple social, spatial, and cultural connections between them are key to understanding its significance. Pages crystallized and made public post-Stalinist intelligentsia agendas that were hitherto more inchoate or private: the canonization of new authors and re-canonization of stigmatized cultural figures; the reforging of inter-generational cultural links; and the search for “sincere” language and behavior. These agendas were intricately intertwined, and embodied both in the almanac's content, and in the behavior of the loose grouping of writers and artists who produced it. The Thaw is increasingly analyzed not only in terms of literary and artistic innovation (and rehabilitation of suppressed aesthetic traditions), but also as experiments in new forms of behavior and community.Footnote 11 Hopes for aesthetic, ethical, and emotional change were often inextricably intertwined, and enacted in tandem. The communities and behavior that coalesced around Thaw publications ought therefore to be analyzed in tandem with the texts themselves. This enlarged perspective also broadens the resonance of Thaw landmark texts beyond the often brief duration of their official approval; Pages is a stark example, withdrawn within weeks of publication, yet influential far beyond that time.Footnote 12
While this aesthetic and behavioral perspective on the Thaw is quite well-established, the role of place in shaping these multi-faceted experiments is not. Indeed, the spatial specificity of Pages itself, whose name advertises its provincial origins, has been largely overlooked. More broadly, the local and regional dimensions of the Thaw have long lain in the shadows of Moscow and Leningrad, whose literary, artistic and educational institutions were key hotbeds of the Thaw.Footnote 13 So too were their domestic gatherings (kompanii), neighborhoods such as the Arbat, or writers’ “villages” including Peredelkino.Footnote 14 However, place played a crucial role in producing markedly diverse inflections of the Thaw. For example, Ukraine's shistdesiatnyky were crucially different from Russian shestidesiatniki, despite shared preoccupations with literary, ethical, and psychological renewal.Footnote 15 The location of the new post-Stalinist “science city” Akademgorodok in the Siberian forest likewise shaped its inhabitants’ (ultimately illusory) sense of being able to develop a more democratic and open intellectual culture.Footnote 16 Small communities outside major cities could also foster intellectual and behavioral experimentation, seemingly inspired by the sense of remoteness or intimacy.Footnote 17 This article analyzes more systematically how provincial space, and especially the metropolitan margins, produced experiments with new forms of post-Stalinist community and behavior, as well as aesthetic innovation and canon reformation.
Pages could not have originated anywhere but Tarusa: its inclusive authorial cohort, informal editing practices, and eclectic but cohesive final text were all crucially determined by the place of publication. This was a town with a concentration of previously stigmatized and excluded cultural figures: their re-inclusion would become a key preoccupation of the almanac, enacted in its editing practices as well as the final text. Tarusa had also long been a refuge and retreat from the city, and from the pressures of official Soviet culture for metropolitan writers and artists. Pages was no parochial project: it arose out of migration and pilgrimage between metropole and provinces, and out of the distinctive sociability shaped by Tarusa's position on the outer limit of dacha territory and the inner edge of the 100-kilometre exclusion zone around Moscow. While the “101st kilometer” is usually associated with social, cultural, and spatial exclusion, Tarusa produced a Soviet publication that expressed an inclusive view of Soviet culture, inspired by local practices and styles of community-building and socializing.Footnote 18 While the text itself was ephemeral, its networks and agendas had complex afterlives in Soviet and unofficial literature.
Tarusa's Traditions
Although published in Kaluga and later punished in Moscow, Pages was most fundamentally shaped by the cultural and social traditions of Tarusa. Tarusa is a small town with a rich history dating back to the thirteenth century, picturesquely located on the river Oka in Kaluga oblast, 137 kilometers southwest of Moscow.Footnote 19 Superficially, there was little to distinguish it from countless other small towns that fell just outside the orbit of the Soviet capital.Footnote 20 Indeed, the provincial origins of Pages are often explained merely as a strategy to bypass more stringent censorship at the Soviet center.Footnote 21 Natal΄ia Ivanova ascribes more importance to place, but posits Tarusa as typically provincial, rather than playing a unique role.Footnote 22 In fact, Tarusa's long-standing status as a retreat for metropolitan writers, and also as a refuge for stigmatized Soviet citizens, was crucially important to Pages’ ethos and editing.
On the one hand, Tarusa was on the outer edge of dacha territory, necessitating a tortuous journey from Moscow, rewarded on arrival with a sense of remoteness, unspoiled nature, and traditional lifestyles.Footnote 23 These attractions, and the complex patterns of habitation and visitation that they inspired, rendered it comparable with European nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century artistic colonies: indeed, it was known as the “Russian Barbizon” even before Pages came out.Footnote 24 A few enterprising writers and artists had been inspired to buy summer estates and homes in Tarusa from the late nineteenth century onwards—amongst them, Ivan Tsvetaev (father to the Tsvetaeva sisters), and the painter Vasilii Polenov.Footnote 25 They, together with resident artists, drew more cultural figures, including the painter Borisov-Musatov, who lived and painted at the Tsvetaev house in 1905, to summer there or reside year round.Footnote 26
On the other hand, Tarusa was close to the “100-kilometer ring” around Moscow, within which various categories of formerly repressed citizens were not allowed to settle.Footnote 27 In the 1920s, which pre-dated these passport zones, Tarusa was already considered a key 101st-kilometer town: the Polenov household, amongst others, took in exiles in this period.Footnote 28 After the legislation was codified in the early 1930s, larger numbers of returnees from the Gulag and forced exile made their way there, to live during the lengthy (or endless) limbo between release and rehabilitation. Some settled, while others lived there temporarily—often in friends’ spare rooms—as they awaited metropolitan residency. Even after securing it, many visited Tarusa, especially during summer.
These generations of dachniki and “101st kilometer-ers” (stoperviki) shaped distinctive forms of sociability and cultural collaboration that would later influence the almanac. The pre-revolutionary intelligentsia dacha and estate traditions of Tarusa, like those of suburban and exurban estates such as Abramtsevo, celebrated the cross-fertilization and informal performance of poetry, theatre, art, and music. Participants of gatherings in Polenovo, for example, were encouraged to be eclectic, experimenting beyond the art-form of their expertise; Polenov's “house of the people,” opened in 1915, offered more publicly accessible versions of these evenings.Footnote 29 The artist and writer community in Tarusa also depended on open hospitality: a small number of key dachas and estates passed repeatedly between several prominent pre-revolutionary artistic families, accumulating dense cultural traditions within a small number of homes.Footnote 30 The help offered to stigmatized cultural figures drew on similar traditions. Before the end of the Stalin era, certain homes in Tarusa were unofficially renowned as both refuges and as cultural hubs. For example, after settling in Tarusa in 1946, the returnee doctor Mikhail Melent΄ev hosted a stream of people denied metropolitan residency, and also a rich program of musical, literary, and artistic evenings, frequented by offspring of major pre-revolutionary cultural figures.Footnote 31
These traditions of cultural cross-fertilization and sociability were thus already established before the end of the Stalin era; so too was the mixture of resident, semi-resident, and visiting artists and writers, which would make the “Tarusian” identity of Pages so complex. Visiting around 1956, the film-maker Andrei Tarkovskii and Aleksandr Gordon observed that: “Tarusa is a little town of writers, poets and artists. Some have bought a house and live here year-round, others come only for the summer, and a third group are forced to live constantly in rented apartments, because they're not allowed into Moscow, because of the law of the 101st kilometer.”Footnote 32 The interaction of these groups was not unique to Tarusa: it was also a defining feature of metropolitan kompanii.Footnote 33 Nonetheless, the intimacy and density of the “little town” intensified its effects: Alexander Etkind even claims that “overcrowded with returnees, this picturesque town became the intellectual and poetic center of the Thaw.”Footnote 34
Much of this “overcrowding” was down to the hospitality of a small number of hosts: notably “Aunt Polia” (Pelageia Stepina) and Zoia Tsvetkova, who took in Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam and members of the Tvsetaev family, amongst others.Footnote 35 The most famous refuge was the house of Nikolai Otten and Elena Golysheva on Tarusa's central street, completed in 1958. Otten, an erstwhile victim of the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign and his second wife, a distinguished Anglo-Russian translator, lived in one half, while other relatives, including Golysheva's son by her first marriage, lived in the other.Footnote 36 Both halves frequently took in returnees (including Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Ariadna Efron, and Aleksandr Gladkov), and artists and writers needing a room for the summer (such as Boris Balter and Frida Vigdorova), who would all feature in Pages.Footnote 37 Even before the 1960s, this “wide open” household was renowned for literary and artistic discussion.Footnote 38
As well as these semi-resident returnees, some former prisoners and exiles actively sought to settle there: most importantly for Pages, Arkadii Shteinberg. This painter-poet had grown up in Tarusa and owned a house there in the 1930s before his arrest; after a protracted legal dispute on his return from the Gulag, Shteinberg abandoned attempts to take back his former house, and bought a different one in the town center, where his old camp friend, the painter Boris Sveshnikov, lived with him for several years.Footnote 39 Like the Otten-Golysheva household, the “highly sociable” pair regularly hosted cultural gatherings from the mid-1950s onwards.Footnote 40 These focused on literature and painting, the twin poles of Shteinberg's own career, but also extended across the broad interests of the “great dilettante” host.Footnote 41 Discussions did not avoid the camps or Stalinism, but nor—unlike some zek socializing—were they dominated by them.Footnote 42 Even before publication of Pages, in which Shteinberg's household would play a key role, it was noted as a site where “two generations of Russian culture intersected: the past, miraculously preserved, and the new-modern, starting to emerge.”Footnote 43
Several other returnees from the Gulag and exile were active within Tarusa's social scene by the late 1950s, and would later participate in Pages. They included Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, who had moved in 1958 to live in Tarusa (firstly with the Ottens) and regularly attended domestic gatherings, delivering verdicts on literary works and performing drafts of her memoirs.Footnote 44 Ariadna Efron had also returned to live in Tarusa in the mid-1950s, though was less sociable.Footnote 45 The formerly repressed poet, Nikolai Zabolotskii, permitted to live in Moscow from the early 1950s, nonetheless spent the last two summers of his life in Tarusa, encouraged by his friend, Nikolai Stepanov.Footnote 46
Meanwhile, for those not directly affected by these reforms, there were also compelling reasons to congregate in Tarusa. In seeking to understand these patterns of migration, the Barbizon comparison is again instructive: in European and North American artistic colonies, resident older artists, such as Gustave Corot in Barbizon, played a key role in attracting “disciples” (often, but not always students) for summer creative work and socializing, if not permanent residency.Footnote 47 In post-Stalinist Tarusa, the principal elder “magnet figure” was Konstantin Paustovskii. A beloved mentor to many post-war Moscow literature students, he had taken up residence in Tarusa in 1955, lured by the descriptions of colleagues (including Otten), and by health concerns.Footnote 48
Soon after moving to Tarusa, Paustovskii started to draw national attention to the locale's natural beauty and cultural traditions, but also its economic neglect, anticipating his framing of Pages. By this time, he was also renowned for his editorship of the controversial Literaturnaia Moskva almanac, and his Moscow Writers’ Union speech in defense of Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone. He was thus a key figure connecting the early Thaw in the capital and the provinces. By the late 1950s, his centrally located house was a place of pilgrimage for former students trying to establish themselves as Soviet writers, such as Balter, as well as for returnee authors, including Zabolotskii and Gladkov.Footnote 49 It hosted frequent writers’ gatherings, often centered on poetry reading.Footnote 50
Tarusa thus emerged (or re-emerged) in the early post-Stalin era as a kind of artists’ and writers’ colony comprising visitors, residents and semi-residents, bound loosely by love of nature, literature and art, and by a flexible sociability facilitated by the proximity of small-town life.Footnote 51 Unsurprisingly given its long-standing status as a cultural dacha community, its social life resembled that of Peredelkino, Krasnaia Pakhra, Abramtsevo or Koktebel΄.Footnote 52 Stephen Lovell argues that post-Stalinist intelligentsia dacha life often modelled itself on the “intensive informal interaction and intellectual association” and “intelligentsia counter-model of country life” of pre-revolutionary dachas and estates, and Tarusa certainly had a wealth of such traditions.Footnote 53 Even before the death of Stalin, however, marginalized figures without a home of their own (let alone a second residence) were a familiar presence too.Footnote 54 The ways in which they were (re)integrated into the local community would shape the cohort and ethos of Pages.
The frequent social and cultural exchange between these populations was epitomized by the shifting membership of the three key salons of Shteinberg, Otten, and Paustovskii. While Shteinberg and Paustovskii were viewed as mentors, even as charismatic leaders of their kruzhki, Otten and Golysheva saw themselves more as facilitators of discussion.Footnote 55 All three households, though, fostered eclectic literary and artistic interests, and all functioned partly as forums to discuss unpublished works. Thus the kompanii of this provincial town, like their metropolitan counterparts, were cultural and social experiments.Footnote 56 Their key ingredients were a sense of informality and privacy, shared love of literature and art, and intermingling of returnees with emergent and established cultural figures. Such gatherings are often viewed as laboratories of samizdat and dissidence in the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc.Footnote 57 However, unlike the burgeoning samizdat focus of many city kompanii and of other Podmoskov΄e communities such as Lianozovo, Tarusa's salons coalesced around a major Soviet publication, which reimagined Soviet literature and literary community.
The Creation of Pages
As a much-mythologized publication, Pages has several origin stories.Footnote 58 What unites them is informal socializing: Paustovskii's conversations at a Yalta writers’ retreat in the late 1950s and/or his discussions in Tarusa in 1960 with local writers and editors Vladimir Koblikov, Nikolai Panchenko, and Roman Levita.Footnote 59 However, official institutions abetted publication too: the Kaluga oblast publishing house supported Pages, partly because its most controversial elements remained concealed until late in the process, but also because it saw it as an opportunity to rebut accusations of parochialism and provincial stagnation.
The Kaluga oblast publishing house was relatively new at the time that it published Pages, and the scandal effectively ended its operations as a standalone entity. Created in 1958, it was intended to promote the work of local writers on local themes, such as the oblast's industrial and agricultural progress, and local history.Footnote 60 However, delays in the thematic plan's fulfilment, linked to editorial inexperience and the lack of a local Writers’ Union, meant that the first few years’ output was dominated by outside assignments (zakaznaia literatura).Footnote 61 Nonetheless, Pages was not its first almanac; the debut literary collection, Literaturnaia Kaluga, came out in the first year of the publishing house's existence.Footnote 62 It provided the chief editor, Roman Levita, and writer-editors Vladimir Koblikov and Nikolai Panchenko, with experience in identifying and collating local literary talent that they later drew on for Pages. It also attracted criticism, however, for detachment from important issues of the day, a charge much amplified for their next almanac.Footnote 63 By the start of the 1960s, the publisher had also forged links with local historians, such as Ivan Bodrov, who would later participate in Pages.Footnote 64
Progress remained so slow, however, that by the early 1960s, the director, A. Sladkov, was terming it a “depression that we are suffering.”Footnote 65 There were economic incentives to seek a cure; the publishers were under pressure to address poor sales and increase profitability.Footnote 66 Artistic literature represented a barely tapped resource, while local history already had an enthusiastic readership; moreover, a 1959 Central Committee resolution had urged Soviet publishers to produce more high-quality almanacs.Footnote 67 There was thus a captive audience for a distinguished collection of local literature and history, which was exactly how Pages was touted to the publisher.
Pages first appeared in local party and state decision-making in February 1961, when the Tarusa raikom asked the Kaluga publisher to approve a proposal from a “group of writers living in our town” to publish “a literary-artistic collection entitled Tarusa” under the editorship of Nikolai Otten (Paustovskii featured prominently, but as contributing author, not co-editor).Footnote 68 The collection sought “to unite the works of writers living in Tarusa, linked to it, and also writing about Tarusa,” establishing from the start its expansive definition of local belonging. Also present from the outset was a broad range of documentary, literary, and artistic genres. “Sketches and literary pieces on the theme of Tarusa today and tomorrow” stood firmly, and strategically, atop a list that also included short stories, “new poetry,” Tarusa-themed painting, and publications from archives in and about Tarusa.Footnote 69
While both these features survived into the final version, there was a greater divergence between the proposed and final cohorts of authors. The editors did admit that, though firm agreements had been drawn up with the majority of authors, “conversation is postponed with an insignificant number of them until the collection is approved and the deadlines for submission and publication are clarified.”Footnote 70 In fact, it cited several authors not featured in the final version (including Vladimir Tendriakov and Ariadna Efron), and also omitted some who would feature (notably, Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Bulat Okudzhava, and Marina Tsvetaeva). Perhaps in anticipation of these changes, the proposal ended with a reminder that “it is natural that in the process of preparing the collection, changes could happen in the plan—cutting down, swaps, additions—without it changing the general character and fundamental make-up of the authors.”Footnote 71
It is unclear whether the almanac was accepted in early 1961, but it only appeared in the thematic plan in June. That month, the regional publisher secured permission from the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) publishing authority (Glavizdat) to make a late change, proposing a collection now entitled Pages from Tarusa, in place of a planned edition of Mark Twain stories that had not materialized in time.Footnote 72 The collection promised to fulfil the literary aspirations of the publisher and its “commercial goals,” when performance on both indicators was dismal.Footnote 73 Assigned a substantial print-run of 75,000, it was described as a “compil[ation] of first publications of new works of famous Soviet writers, linked to our oblast…first publication of new tales, stories, poetry and poemy,” together with sketches about agricultural heroes and newly discovered pre-revolutionary art-works.Footnote 74 All of the writers named here did appear in the final version; curiously, the only one listed as rehabilitated was Zabolotskii, though the proposal named several other returnees without specifying them as such. However, the proposal once again failed to mention Okudzhava, Mandel΄shtam, or Tvsetaeva, and also omitted Shteinberg or Balter, who had appeared in the original proposal. Some of these omissions were probably deliberate.
The editing of the collection was concentrated in the period after glavizdat approval, and in the center of Tarusa. One contributor, Galina Kornilova, claimed that “the very appearance of the almanac, the idea of creating it…is directly linked to that inimitable creative atmosphere that formed during those hot summer days in the little town on the Oka.”Footnote 75 The “direct link” between 1961 Tarusa and Pages is not specified here: there was a local “atmosphere” of creativity and collaboration, at once distinctive yet resistant to articulation. In fact, “the very appearance of the almanac” can be explained by patterns of writers’ migration and socializing in Tarusa, shaped by long-term traditions that peaked in the early 1960s, but also by a less tangible ethos that came to surround the publication.
Pages was rooted in the spatial and social center of Tarusa's intelligentsia community. Its named editors were Paustovskii, along with Koblikov and Panchenko from the Kaluga publishers, and Tarusa's other main hosts of intelligentsia gatherings, Otten and Shteinberg.Footnote 76 Although the publisher's editor-in-chief, Roman Levita, assumed that Paustovskiii would only play a decorative role as “compiler-editor,” he has been credited as the “soul” of the almanac, assembling (even “blessing”) its authorial collective.Footnote 77 Otten also carried out significant editorial work, however, as promised in the proposal.Footnote 78 Their two households, along with the Shteinberg residence, were the key sites where work on the publication proceeded.Footnote 79 Uncredited work deepened the connection to a tiny number of key Tarusa homes: editing and correction was also carried out by Otten's wife, Elena Golysheva, their one-time lodger Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Frida Vigdorova, and Ariadna Efron, by that time settled in her own Tarusa house.Footnote 80 The artistic design was by M. Borisova-Musatova, daughter of Tarusa's famed pre-revolutionary artist.
While all the key editors of Pages were thus deeply connected to Tarusa, the links of the broader authorial collective to the town were less clear. Otten would later try to rebut charges of a national fronde by claiming the collection featured writers “on the periphery with which they're tightly connected.”Footnote 81 Most were indeed linked to the town, but there was also some truth in the CC's later criticism that Pages contained “things written in Tarusa, and where the author had any kind of near or distant relationship with the geographical point.”Footnote 82 These difficulties in categorizing authors’ relationships with the town derived, ultimately, from the locality's flexible patterns of community formation and artistic collaboration.
Nevertheless, like the editorial board, the authorial collective did have Tarusians at its heart. All named editors contributed one or more literary or historical works. Joining this core of Tarusa residents were works by and about erstwhile inhabitants (such as Tsvetaeva), by local historians (such as Ivan Bodrov), and by two daughters of Polenov.Footnote 83 Also featured in the almanac were seasonal renters who regularly visited Tarusa, such as Nikolai Zabolotskii, Iurii Kazakov, and Boris Balter.Footnote 84 Two of the main sketch-writers were former or current occupants of the Otten-Golysheva household: Mandel΄shtam and Frida Vigdorova, the famous Soviet journalist who spent her first summer in Tarusa in 1961.Footnote 85 Meanwhile, the friendship and co-habitation of the returnee Aleksandr Gladkov with Nikolai Otten was hinted at in their jointly authored screenplay in Pages; Gladkov also produced a substantial sketch of Meyerhold.Footnote 86 Unacknowledged in the table of contents was Ariadna Efron's editorial work on her late mother's poetry, and Mandel΄shtam's authorship of several sketches.Footnote 87 Thus, even contributors who lived in Tarusa had a variety of attachments to it, ranging from home ownership, to regular dacha residency to—the almanac's unspoken subtext—the improvised, semi-temporary housing arrangements of returnees and other marginalized figures.
Overlapping with this spectrum of residential affiliations were the short visits that many more writers made to Tarusa, especially in the intensive travel between Moscow and this corner of Podmoskov΄e that characterized the summer of 1961. What unleashed this “flood” was Paustovskii's decision to solicit manuscripts in a non-prescriptive way, demanding only “talented” unpublished writing.Footnote 88 This represented a break from the “thematic plan” model of Soviet publishing, and reflected the greater freedoms of a one-off publication (which Paustovskii already knew from Literaturnaia Moskva). However, a certain logic still drove the expansion beyond Tarusa's resident and semi-resident writers: a combination of Paustovskii's “charismatic” editorship and patronage of talent from his own networks, and an expansion of this circle, as friends of friends vouched for authors’ suitability to join the almanac's collective.Footnote 89
Paustovskii turned firstly to the loyal and strongly bonded cohorts of his students in Moscow's Gor΄kii Literary institute, which generated offerings from writers such as Iurii Trifonov, Evgenii Vinokurov, Lev Krivenko, and Vladimir Kornilov. Other contributors such as Balter, Koblikov, Panchenko, and Kazakov were doubly connected to Paustovskii, via both the Literary Institute and Tarusa socializing.Footnote 90 These authors had well-established bonds of trust with Paustovskii and so felt less trepidation submitting manuscripts to him than to Soviet publishers.Footnote 91 Though Paustovskii left little testimony about Pages, this core of barely published former students suggests that patronage of new writers was a key element of his editorial vision.
The almanac, however, also recruited participants at one or more removes from Paustovskii's pupils. Bulat Okudzhava, for example, had been a Literary institute student too, but heard about Pages from Boris Balter, with whom he worked at Literaturnaia gazeta, and who read his story in manuscript. Over a drink in Moscow, he persuaded Okudzhava to participate in the plans for Pages, which he called a publication by a “group of enthusiasts.”Footnote 92 Okudzhava's long-term connections to Kaluga further smoothed the path to publication.Footnote 93 In turn, Okudzhava spread the word to colleagues, especially from his Literaturnaia gazeta networks, including Boris Slutskii and David Samoilov.Footnote 94 Vladimir Maksimov also did not feel as though he belonged in Paustovskii's inner circle: “he had his own disciples at the literary institute, in particular, Lev Krivenko…Boris Balter and Benedikt Sarnov,” he would later recall, “those were the people from our generation with whom he was genuinely intimate.” He therefore attributed his involvement in Pages to the fact that “[he] was taken to see him by people at Literaturnaia gazeta: Okudzhava, Korzhavin, and Stanislav Rassadin.”Footnote 95 Having never been to Tarusa, he first visited after submitting the manuscript, and subsequently lived there for several periods in the 1960s. Thus, the authorial cohort was linked by varying attachments to Tarusa, and by intricate networks of friendship and patronage stretching well beyond those of the editors. Assurances that potential members were svoi (our people) were crucial to this cohort's formation, but it remained a less “tightly knit milieu” than many intelligentsia groupings based around this principle.Footnote 96
Natal΄ia Ivanova terms this collective the “Tarusa fraternity (sodruzhestvo),” a union of individuals linked by “talent and moral choice,” and deliberately (if subtly) contrasted to the Writers’ Union itself.Footnote 97 Her observation, echoed in a 2019 Moscow exhibition about this “special fraternity of marginal, creatively gifted and independent-thinking people,” invites investigation of the practices and (perhaps unspoken) beliefs that bonded this collective, and the extent of its differences from official Soviet practices.Footnote 98 Here, again, place-specific artistic and literary groupings offer instructive parallels, since they too were not linked by an artistic manifesto or style as much as by the ethos of their group interactions in their characteristic locale.Footnote 99 The Bloomsbury group, for example, was linked primarily by the neighborhood in which their social interactions took place, and by an ethos of individual self-expression and intellectual excellence (inflected by their class background).Footnote 100 The interactions within the “Tarusa fraternity,” though more ephemeral and less prolific, can be “read” in a similar way. The summer of Pages’ editing is especially illuminating: Iurii Kazakov, who preferred his dacha to the town center, nevertheless recalled fondly that “the time of the most interesting encounters in Tarusa was summer 1961. That was when Pages was being compiled and many people arrived. It was a happy time.”Footnote 101 His remarks capture the intertwining of editorial work and community formation in this emotionally and socially intense period of work and play. They also raise the crucial question of how new arrivals found “routes to being insiders.”Footnote 102
Such “routes” were particularly visible to Okudzhava, as a newcomer unacquainted with most of the collective when he sent in his story.Footnote 103 Encouraged by Boris Balter, he embarked on the difficult journey to Tarusa and arrived feeling nervous at the prospect of meeting the legendary author (and now editor). Paustovskii was hospitable, however, warmly welcoming all guests including newcomers, and telling anecdotes. Even though he knew some attendees from Kaluga, Okudzhava remained “silent as a novice” during the dinner, drinking, and Paustovskii's continued story-telling. Perhaps because he remained an observer, he was sensitive to “secret signals” in the gazes, intonation and gestures of those present, which lent the gathering a “special agitated quality,” a subtext of trepidation about the innovative and potentially dangerous collection being drafted. After leaving Paustovskii's house at the end of an evening that had featured little work on the almanac, the same group of writers reconvened in a shed in a nearby courtyard. In this second part of the evening, Okudzhava finally found his voice: as the drinking continued, a guitar was produced and he sang songs, as Balter and Paustovskii raised toasts to the emerging collective of Pages. Still nervous of Paustovskii, one of few present who did not know the words of his songs, Okudzhava could not remember the content of the conversation in that shed. However, the “kind attitude” of Paustovskii, his hospitality and non-insistence on hierarchy, cemented their friendship. The sociability of this free-wheeling evening epitomized the “informal editing” of Pages.Footnote 104 Okudzhava's sensitivity to the evening's atmosphere and mood was no accident: his account, and many others, suggest that Paustovskii saw “his usual beloved atmosphere” of intimacy and authentic self-expression as a sine qua non of literary collaboration.Footnote 105
While Okudzhava's first party served only to bond the authorial and editorial collective, other gatherings were dedicated to honing the almanac's content. Both, however, privileged the creation of an “atmosphere” conducive to sincerity (already a key Thaw value), informality and intimacy, even for newcomers.Footnote 106 Many of the almanac's draft contributions were read out to the audiences at informal gatherings, the summer weather enabling leisurely outdoor meals and discussions.Footnote 107 Galina Kornilova remembered constant poetry and prose readings at Paustovskii's house, where the host was surrounded by pupils, but it was “merely one young and happy company, where everyone was equal”; like Okudzhava, she was struck by the “nice atmosphere.”Footnote 108 The Ottens hosted similar “editorial” gatherings. Deepening the crossover between work and “summer fun,” and between relationships of professionalism and friendship, authors would also read out new works on nature walks and fishing trips.Footnote 109 Such performances were accompanied by other elements of oral culture, a key index of sincerity during the post-Stalinist crisis of Soviet language.Footnote 110 As seen above, these included guitar poetry, already common at kompanii and symbolic of a quest for authenticity.Footnote 111 Conversations were at the heart of Pages’ editing too: they concerned not just draft works, but also a range of other intellectual interests. Also important to the “feel” of these gatherings was the disregard of generational or social hierarchies.Footnote 112 The exchanges between Paustovskii and his young literary acolytes seemed to make him “feel younger.”Footnote 113 The frequent attendance of Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Shteinberg, and Sveshnikov reinforced this sense of creative endeavor across generations, and without regard to past stigmas.Footnote 114
Pages was thus an emotional community with its own emotional style, as well as an editorial collective. Barbara Rosenwein argues that “subordinate emotional communities, partake[e] in the larger one and revea[l] its possibilities and its limitations,” while Benno Gammerl suggests that “diverging emotional patterns and practices prevail in distinct spatial settings.”Footnote 115 These models capture well how the editing in this small town set itself apart from, but not in opposition to, Soviet norms: after all, it aimed to produce a Soviet publication, albeit one that would introduce or re-introduce many unfamiliar authors. However, its editing was grounded in domestic socializing, rather than in Soviet institutional or strictly professional settings. Its vision of Soviet literature was relatively non-prescriptive and inclusive, open to writers recommended by trusted colleagues, but subjecting their works to exacting, yet friendly, scrutiny. Such scrutiny, however, was considered a form of pleasure, even leisure, for both writer and editor(s); as such, it was easy for actual leisure pursuits to blend into editorial “work,” and vice versa. If these activities were clearly distinct from Soviet publication practices, there were more similarities with metropolitan kompanii. However, the proximity and beauty of nature, the more leisurely lifestyle of writers outside the city, and the concentration of marginalized figures on the 101st kilometer all contributed to a distinctive tenor of work and play in this locale. They also skewed the almanac, controversially, towards and even beyond the limits of the Soviet literary canon.
Canon and Continuity
The almanac's emergence out of variegated though interlinked social networks predisposed it to eclecticism; so did its non-prescriptive editorial criteria. Pages exemplified tolerance and openness to “creative individuality,” a scandalous stance in a publishing world still supposedly united under a single literary doctrine.Footnote 116 The editorial framing also downplayed the almanac's strict cohesion, highlighting instead its “diversity” of authors and themes.Footnote 117 The almanac had a correspondingly complex structure, verging on a lack of structure. It was considerably less neatly categorized than the genre divisions that structured Literaturnaia Moskva, or indeed the major Soviet thick journals. After several sketches by Paustovskii—a deliberate foregrounding of a prestigious figure—Pages swung repeatedly between groups of journalistic sketches, “new poetry,” and prose. The only section with a designated title—the concluding “publications” section—ranged even more widely. It encompassed local history, literary and cultural studies, biographical sketches, and more poetry by the late Zabolotskii and Tsvetaeva. The sole constant across all sections was pre-revolutionary art, most by or featuring Polenov and Borisov-Musatov. The only other illustrations were photos in the publications section (a non-canonical group comprising Tsvetaeva, Meyerhold, and Zabolotskii, alongside the more orthodox Iurii Krymov), and some hero-worker head-shots.
Nonetheless, significant clusters can be identified. The extensive prose and poetry about World War II was one of its most controversial features.Footnote 118 A smaller number of works subtly probed the mentalities and legacies of Stalinism.Footnote 119 The cluster about rural life encompassed nature lyricsFootnote 120 and poems and short stories about the Virgin Lands and Soviet agriculture.Footnote 121 There were also some startling works about Soviet youthFootnote 122, as well as numerous journalistic, historical, literary, and artistic texts about Tarusa and its environs.Footnote 123
Another way to categorize the collection is by generation. Pages foregrounded primarily young and/or not established writers, and older or deceased figures until recently excluded from the canon.Footnote 124 This echoed the prominence of young writers and formerly repressed figures within the “Tarusa fraternity.” While many of the texts by young writers evoked generational distinction or even alienation, the reintroduction of long-excluded writers sought instead to reforge links with the past and reintegrate figures relegated to or beyond the Soviet margins. Moreover, the textual strategies for this re-inclusion, virtually neglected to date, reveal striking intersections with the almanac's emotional style.
Paustovskii's Literaturnaia Moskva had been notable for Il΄ia Ehrenburg's pioneering analysis of Marina Tsvetaeva.Footnote 125 While Tsvetaeva was again one of the key figures within Pages, so too were other figures silenced or repressed under Stalinism, notably Ivan Bunin, whose works Paustovskii was editing for future publication, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, repressed under Stalin. Paustovskii and other authors also sought to evoke the artistic achievements of writers on the edge of the canon, such as Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Zabolotskii, the latter rehabilitated and back in print already in the 1950s but with many works unpublished at the time of his 1958 death. The sections on Tsvetaeva and Zabolotskii featured numerous poems, and biographical and autobiographical sketches, while other figures received only biographical portraits.Footnote 126 However, all relied on the rich depiction of personality, and on evocations of the figure's personal, emotional impact on the writer.
Even the most apparently orthodox sketch—Vsevolod Ivanov's brief portrait of Tsvetaeva—encouraged readers to understand the “identity of the highly gifted and original poet,” and to approach her poetry with “deep thought,” rather than the glib categorization of the preceding decades.Footnote 127 Gladkov's longer and more intimate sketch of Meyerhold, his close friend, mentor, and abiding focus of his post-Gulag writing, encouraged sensitive reappraisal of a long-stigmatized figure.Footnote 128 Taking the reader inside private spaces, and into his deep friendship and “trust” with Meyerhold, Gladkov's testimony conveyed unimpeachable authenticity.Footnote 129 Meyerhold emerged vividly as a “unique” figure, a “rich and broad” personality who could not be “[broken] into small fragments”; this “unity” of character, the life-long determination to “remain himself,” was as great an achievement as his difficult pursuit of theatrical innovation.Footnote 130 Gladkov wanted readers to “fall in love” with Meyerhold, much as “his whole generation” had succumbed to the “force of his charm” in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 131
Both these sketches of non-canonical figures appeared in the final, “publications” section, but Paustovskii's literary sketches, extracted from the new volume of his Golden Rose, set the tone of intimate and emotional portraiture from the start.Footnote 132 His sketch of Iurii Olesha (who had died the year before) identified the author's sharp wit as his key character trait, through vivid anecdotes of their strolls around Odessa. His sketch of Bunin, a much more marginal author, recounted visits to places associated with him before his emigration. Paustovskii's close connection with the genius loci reflected his repositioning of Bunin as a writer rooted in Russia (despite these later dislocations), and as a key link between contemporary culture and its preceding phases. Paustovskii approached Blok in a similar vein, as a quintessentially Russian artist, with whom he wished to “be friends,” to compensate for the “loss” of never having met.Footnote 133 This wistful desire for friendship emerged out of a deeply felt reaction to his “expressive” and “miraculous” art.Footnote 134 Of the almanac's authors, Paustovskii was the most explicit about needing to forge the “tightest link” between the cultural legacy of the early twentieth century and the literary process of the present: “one cannot know the new Russia without knowing the old one,” he ended his Blok sketch.Footnote 135 Much like Ehrenburg, he could passionately advocate for such continuity with relatively little fear of reprisals.
Through reading about these personal connections to remarkable personalities, readers were encouraged to open their hearts and minds to figures on or beyond the periphery of Soviet literature, in a striking echo of Tarusa's warmth towards “excluded” figures. However, a sense of irreparable loss shadowed these deeply personal portraits. The portrayal of Zabolotskii by his friend Stepanov and by the author himself covered the 1950s and his childhood respectively, with a yawning gap for his Gulag years.Footnote 136 By the time he tried to rebuild his literary career, Stepanov explained, Zabolotskii was struggling with health problems, his arrest having cut him off in his physical and creative prime. The sad impossibility of rejuvenation was underscored by David Samoilov's poem dramatizing his 1957 meeting with the dying poet.Footnote 137 Meanwhile, Ivanov's introduction to Tvsetaeva mentioned the “hard and bitter life that she was fated to live,” and Gladkov's sketch of Meyerhold contrasted the creative energy of the 1920s to “the objectively historic tragedy…that cost Meyerhold and others dearly” in the 1930s.Footnote 138 The fact that the latter author himself required reintroduction after the Gulag deepened the sense of sadness and loss.Footnote 139
Joy at reconnecting with the past, but also anxiety about historical and cultural rupture, similarly permeated the numerous evocations of Tarusa's pre-revolutionary past. The more celebratory, and conventionally Soviet sketches of local heroes were probably inserted to balance out, or camouflage, these historically and emotionally complex pieces. The sketches about Polenov and Borisov-Musatov evoked nostalgia for the town's pre-revolutionary intelligentsia community and creativity, but subtly suggested that the revolution had disrupted them.Footnote 140 Such writing helped to revitalize the town's past, as did the work of local historians and museums, described in several pieces.Footnote 141 Like the subtle historical and biographical sketches of Vigdorova and Mandel΄shtam, however, it mourned the fraying of local cultural traditions, even as it hoped for their restoration.Footnote 142
Overall, then, the almanac was not just an eclectic selection of texts shaped by the open sociability of Tarusa. Like the community that formed around it, it insistently proposed that Soviet literature should revive silenced voices and traditions, and allow new voices to speak. The strategies for (re)integrating these figures expressed the key values of literary excellence, tolerance and emotional expressiveness that had also permeated editorial and authorial interactions in Tarusa. However, this more inclusive vision of Soviet literature would prove fragile and ephemeral.
Afterlives
Like many of the best-known Thaw publications, Pages only just squeaked into print. Local censors claimed that they had been deceived, “rushed and pressured” by the publisher and obkom (oblast committee), lending further credence to the idea that some local leaders may have believed that the almanac could bring reputational benefits.Footnote 143 They were proved wrong soon after printing started in late October; the print-run was halted halfway through, after 30,000 copies, and texts withdrawn where not yet snatched up by readers.Footnote 144 Criticism and punishment of the almanac escalated, provoked by the initially mixed verdict in the local and central press and by the mild rebukes first issued to the culprits.Footnote 145 By late 1961, the Central Committee had issued its judgement via the Bureau for the RSFSR, deeming the almanac full of “political errors and slanderous assertions,” and most works “inadequate in terms of ideological and aesthetic quality”; the “excessive praise” for Tsvetaeva's “decadent” and “depressing” poetry was singled out.Footnote 146 Although the “fraternity” tried to contest this verdict through collective petitions and attendance at the key Moscow meeting, there was no scope for debate.Footnote 147
In response to this escalating central criticism, the obkom imposed harsher punishments on those who had failed to perceive and police Pages’ transgressions. They first reprimanded editors Levita and Panchenko and the director Sladkov before sacking all three from the Kaluga publishing house; the chief regional censor who had approved publication also lost his job, while the obllit (regional censorship office) was brought under tighter ideological and procedural control by Glavlit (central censorship authority) in Moscow.Footnote 148 The main obkom culprits, secretary Surgakov and agitprop head Anan΄ev, were issued stricter penalties than the original charges, though Surgakov later successfully appealed the severity of the reprimand.Footnote 149
Pages was therefore a startling, singular moment: it crystallized key aspirations of the Thaw, yet dashed those hopes almost instantly. Nonetheless, its reverberations can be traced in Tarusa and the capital, in official organizations and unofficial networks, and in both Soviet literature and samizdat. The least well known of these after-effects was on local literary and publishing institutions, which effectively became “provincialized,” after their brief flirtation with national prominence and metropolitan collaboration. This provincialization began not with the punishment of Pages, but with the failure to learn from it. Mere months after the scandal, and despite its supposedly more rigorous leadership, the publisher erred again with a collection of poetry entitled Kaluga-Mars by the local poet Maksim Kravchuk.Footnote 150 While less ambitious and more narrowly “local” than Pages, its “ideologically perverse” poems provoked the second national scandal in as many years for the fledgling publishing house.Footnote 151 Punishment for this “serious error” was swift, sacking Koblikov (who had actually been promoted, rather than punished, in 1962) and penalizing the new director Sorokin.Footnote 152
Most consequentially, the publishing house was subordinated to the Tula regional publisher. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, local Soviet writers were frustrated by the lowly status of the Kalugan “appendage” to the Tula organization, resulting in chronic delays to their manuscripts’ progress and strict quotas being imposed on texts from the region.Footnote 153 The Kaluga branch of the Writers’ Union, instituted in 1963 in a further attempt to prevent scandals, could do little to change this situation. It also failed to engage the most famous Tarusa writers, though Panchenko and Koblikov did participate; the okbom often criticized it as apathetic and unproductive.Footnote 154 By the late 1960s, some leading members, such as Nikolai Voronov, had become embroiled in literary scandals and departed to Moscow.Footnote 155 Thus the innovations and interchange between small-town and metropolitan literary worlds that Pages had produced did not continue through its publisher.
However, if we look beyond official institutions, which after all had played a minor role in Pages, the networks and agendas of the almanac appear more robust than its curtailed existence and somewhat ineffable ethos might suggest. For much of the 1960s, Gladkov, Efron, and Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam continued their attempts to restore the reputations of Tsvetaeva, Meyerhold, and Osip Mandel΄shtam.Footnote 156 Some poetry anthologies, memoirs, and commemorative initiatives resulted, though these patchy successes were dwindling by the mid-1960s.Footnote 157 This work prolonged the collaboration of Pages, deepened friendships between contributors, and strengthened unofficial ties between Tarusa and Moscow. Gladkov, the Ottens, and Mandel΄shtam regularly shuttled between the two locales, often discussing rehabilitation strategies in kompanii with other authors and editors of Pages.Footnote 158
Meanwhile, in Tarusa itself, there was an intensification of the socializing that had characterized the “hot summer days” of 1961, which contrasted to the stagnating local Soviet literary scene. One artist who moved there in 1962, Eduard Plavinskii, noted that Pages wаs fueling pilgrimage to the town, and also a distinctive style amongst visitors: “The fresh, sharp, intellectual material filling the pages attracted the young intelligentsia to it. The town was filled with crowds of poetesses, their hair loose and their gaze nostalgic, and with inspired and disheveled poets.”Footnote 159 These fans responded to Pages as “sharp, intellectual” stimulation and literary education, but also as ways to style themselves as readers and writers: more relaxed, even bohemian, but still fervently “inspired” by young and rediscovered poets alike. This combination of intellectual and emotional pleasure was also captured in a sketch of 1960s Tarusa in the first post-Soviet sequel to Pages, where the local beach was filled with groupings of writers, film-makers, and artists, producing an “emotional concentration” as intense as the editing process.Footnote 160 Thus the networks, migration patterns, and “emotional style” of Pages survived, and even thrived, after the crackdown. The almanac expressed both aesthetic agendas and a behavioral and emotional style, which together crystallized the shestidesiatnik mentality.Footnote 161 This lent Tarusa a magnetic appeal for the intelligentsia in the years after publication.
The end of the Thaw, as it played out locally, was likewise linked both to concrete events and to a less tangible emotional shift. For Nikolai Panchenko, one of Pages’ editors, Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam's move to Moscow and her less frequent visits to Tarusa contributed to a “colder” atmosphere in Tarusa by the late 1960s.Footnote 162 Paustovskii's death in 1968, which reunited much of the Pages cohort for his Tarusa funeral, also provoked sadness at the fading of this erstwhile cultural “epicenter.”Footnote 163 Mandel΄shtam's and Paustovskii's roles here were no accident; the collaboration of these two figures, one a privileged patron and the other officially marginalized but with abundant cultural capital, had epitomized the spirit of Pages. What was being mourned was the realization that the breadth of the “Tarusa fraternity,” and its stretching of the limits of Soviet culture, would be limited to the “short 1960s.”Footnote 164
While Tarusa remained an important dacha settlement for privileged authors and artists, the crossover between this community and more marginal figures diminished sharply in late socialism.Footnote 165 Indicative was the growing number of unofficial artists and dissidents taking refuge in the very homes that had housed figures hopeful of (re-)entering Soviet literature and culture during the Thaw. The Shteinberg house was now most notable for its contribution to Moscow unofficial art.Footnote 166 The Otten-Golsyheva household largely housed samizdat authors, and dissidents barred from metropolitan residency, who often then settled and conducted covert national work from their small-town base.Footnote 167 Local literary discussion often revolved around samizdat, rather than intended Soviet publications, many by Pages authors: Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam's memoirs, Vigdorova's transcript of the Siniavskii-Daniel trial, and works by Maksimov and Kornilov, who had now largely abandoned hope of Soviet publication.Footnote 168 Where the party had punished the editors and publishers (rather than the authors) of Pages, the KGB directly targeted samizdat writers and dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s, increasing their presence in the town tenfold.Footnote 169
In the Khrushchev era, Tarusa's national cultural significance revolved around its inter-generational “fraternity” of published writers. In late socialism, it was most (in)famous as “a center of dissidence.”Footnote 170 Pages emerged out of Tarusa's post-Stalinist salons, which were bound by emotional affinity and shared cultural and literary interests, and crucially shaped by Tarusa's position astride dacha territory and the 101st kilometer. In the early 1960s, they generated a Soviet publication that challenged the limits of Soviet literature, before being relegated beyond them. In late socialism, Tarusa's most nationally significant activity steered clear of official institutions, honing new forms of publishing, community, and collective action beyond the legal frontiers of Sovietness.
