Novelist who began as a Serapion Brother and became the chief gatekeeper of Soviet literature for 18 years
When Fedin, his friend and neighbor of twenty years, came to him for the first time not as a friend but as an official, Pasternak was stunned — Fedin had come to demand he refuse the Nobel Prize.
A major early Soviet novelist who captured the fate of intellectuals during the revolution through formal experimentation in Cities and Years (1924) and Brothers (1928). In the 1940s, his Stalin Prize-winning trilogy (First Joys, An Unusual Summer, and The Bonfire) helped build the canon of Socialist Realism. After becoming First Secretary of the Writers' Union in 1959, he presided over the literary establishment through the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, enforcing party policy by persuading Pasternak to refuse the Nobel Prize and blocking publication of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. The arc from young Serapion Brother demanding artistic freedom to gatekeeper of the Soviet literary apparatus distills the contradictions of cultural politics in the Thaw.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1913First satirical pieces published in Novy Satirikon
- 1914–1918Civilian internee in Germany during World War I
- 1919–1921Red Army service, joined Bolsheviks, then left Party to devote himself to writing
- 1924Published Cities and Years — a landmark early Soviet novel
- 1934Elected to the board of the Union of Soviet Writers
- 1949Awarded Stalin Prize 1st class for First Joys and An Unusual Summer
- 1959–1971First Secretary, Union of Writers of the USSR
- 1971–1977Chairman of the Board, Union of Writers of the USSR
Related historical events
Publication and censorship of Gorky Among Us
Fedin began writing Gorky Among Us in 1941 and completed it in 1944. An installment appeared in a journal in 1941; Part One, The Twenties (Dvadtsatye gody), was published by OGIZ in Moscow in 1943, and Part Two followed in 1944. The second part included portraits of writers such as Fyodor Sologub, Alexei Remizov, and Akim Volynsky. Critics called it “objective” and “dispassionate” and faulted it for neglecting the historical and political background. Marietta Shaginyan accused Fedin of distorting the past, while Nikolai Tikhonov said he had misrepresented Gorky’s position. Part Two was subsequently withdrawn from circulation. One later account says that the memoir could not be published because of party censorship, a claim that conflicts with the bibliographic record of the 1943 and 1944 editions. In 1967, Molodaya Gvardiya published a complete edition of the memoir, with an anonymous “To the Young Reader: From the Publishers” afterword. The publishing-house editor who recounts this episode says the afterword was placed after the text so readers could compare it with the publisher’s interpretation.