Soviet arts chief felled by the Zhdanov anti-formalism campaign, who rebuilt a career as a leading Gogol and Tolstoy scholar
The Politburo resolution of 10 February 1948 declared that "the Committee on Arts Affairs of the USSR Council of Ministers (Comrade Khrapchenko) and the Orgcommittee of the Union of Soviet Composers in essence encouraged the formalist tendency, alien to the Soviet people."
The top cultural administrator of the Stalin era, serving as Chairman of the USSR Committee on Arts Affairs (1939–1948), overseeing all Soviet theatres, music, and fine-arts institutions while sitting on the Stalin Prize committee for arts and literature. He was dismissed in 1948 during the Zhdanov anti-formalism campaign over the opera 'The Great Friendship,' accused of having 'encouraged the formalist tendency.' Reinventing himself as a literary scholar, he became a leading authority on Gogol and Tolstoy, was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1966, and served as academic-secretary of its Literature and Language Division from 1967 until his death.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1924Graduated Smolensk University; secondary-school teacher
- 1928–1931Lecturer in literary history, Sverdlov Communist University and Voronezh University
- 1931–1936Head of curriculum, Institute of Literature and Art, Communist Academy; Chair of Russian Literature, Institute of Red Professors
- 1938–1939Deputy Chairman, Committee on Arts Affairs, USSR SNK
- 1939–1948Chairman, Committee on Arts Affairs, USSR SNK/SM; member, Stalin Prize Committee for arts and literature
- 1948–1963Senior researcher, Gorky Institute of World Literature, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1954–1957Editor-in-chief, journal Oktyabr
- 1967–1986Academician-Secretary, Literature and Language Division, USSR Academy of Sciences
Literary theory and the writer’s creative individuality
From the late 1920s, Khrapchenko studied the styles and methods of Soviet literature, linking theoretical questions to the analysis of individual writers. His books Gogol’s Dead Souls (1952), Gogol’s Works (1954), and Leo Tolstoy as an Artist (1963) examined authors’ worldviews, artistic methods, and creative individuality in relation to their works. In The Writer’s Creative Individuality and the Development of Literature (1970), he rejected the equation of artistic method with worldview and developed a materialist account of the relation between the general and the individual in creative work. The book connected its theoretical argument to examples from Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Sholokhov, other Soviet writers, and Western European authors. Khrapchenko also developed a method for studying literary works in their historical function; in a 1973 article he discussed the scope and ways of applying semiotic principles to Marxist literary scholarship. He received the Lenin Prize for his literary scholarship in 1974.