Documentary evidence by Boris Souvarine about the tragedy of Soviet writers

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of memoirs and documents from the personal archive of B. Souvarine, one of the founders of the French Communist Party, historian, French Sovietologist, known little in our country. In the early 1920’s, Souvarine worked in the Third International in Moscow and was forced to leave for the West because of his bluntly critical attitude to the Stalin’s methods of building socialism. Being an eyewitness of the early years of the Russian revolution and an astute observer of post-revolutionary events, he left vivid testimonies of Soviet history during the interwar twenties. Personal acquaintance with Soviet writers — Gorky, Babel, Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Pasternak, Ehrenburg — allowed him to soundly write about the problem of “writer and power” and the writers’ situation in the USSR in his essays of both retrospective and actual type that he published in “Preuves” magazine during the period of the Cold War. Honest and insightful analysis by Souvarine significantly widened the boundaries of awareness of the Western reader about Soviet literature. Unlike many Western Sovietologists, Souvarine was able to distinguish between the ruling power and people strangled by it. By criticizing the regime and all the horrors associated with it, he was able to tell the Western reader about the literary life hidden behind the raids of officialdom; this way he served as a mediator in the intercultural communication of his time.