Truthseekers, Godbuilders or culture vultures? Some supplementary remarks on religious perspectives in modern Soviet literature

Abstract

In her article on religious themes in recent Soviet literature (RCL. Vol. 16 No. 2) Mary Seton-Watson draws attention to a very important aspect of modern Soviet writing. Over the past twenty years religion Christianity in particular has come to be treated with a serious and at times cautiously sympathetic interest in a sizeable proportion of officially published Soviet prose. When they draw on religious ideas and experience, Soviet authors are doing little more, of course, than reviving a tradition in Russian writing, which was stifled after the Revolution and further quashed by the enforcement of the doctrine of Socialist Realism on literature in the early 1930s. Some of Russia's most highly regarded literary figures rooted their work in religious thought, and it should come as no surpris~ to see the latter-day successors of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov or Pasternak trying to do the same. It would not, then, be fully appropriate to welcome the introduction of religious ideas in official Soviet prose as an indication of a rising surge of religious faith within the Soviet literary establishment. The expression of some kind of religious perception has been given a chance, it is true, but the thinking behind it cries out for closer analysis, particularly as an examination of the way in which religious them~s have been treated in some works suggests that the purpose behi~d their introduction could be less religious than ideological.