Lecture by Jeffrey Hosking at the HSE
On October 11, Jeffrey Hosking, a British historian, professor at University College London, gave a lecture on "By Right of Memory: Aleksandr Tvardovskii and the Post-Stalin Crisis"
The main subject of controversy after Khrushchev's 'secret speech' of February 1956 was memory and its relationship to the Soviet Union's future. Memory, however, is not a simple reproduction of what has happened in the past, especially not in a society which has systematically laid a taboo on personal, 'undisciplined' memory. Without some kind of social validation, individual memories remain disconnected and insubstantial. What many people needed was a trusted public forum in which they could recount what they had experienced and frame it in a wider context.
Creating such a forum was the great achievement of Novyi mir under Aleksandr Tvardovskii. He had experienced in his youth many of the traumas of Stalinist Russia: the denunciation and exile of his family as 'kulaks', his own forced renunciation of them, repeated literary and political attacks on him, the arrest of some of his closest colleagues and the threat of being arrested himself. However, he had retained from his childhood and his family such a strong and independent core to his personality that he was able in later years to overcome the damaging legacy of his his traumatic memories (a) through his creative writing as a poet, and (b) through consciously encouraging as editor the publication of high-quality literature which restored authentic memory of the Soviet Union's past history. Despite serious psychological problems (depressive episodes, bouts of drinking), he was able to lay the foundations for a more honest and reflective recovery of what had been suppressed, in the belief that a more humane society could not be built without an honest history of the past.