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Speaker(s): Ilya Venyavkin, Russian State University of the Humanities, Moscow

The origin and nature of the cult of Stalin has always been a major puzzle for scholars of various disciplines. For a long time the answer was thought to inhere in the dark and ambivalent personality of the Soviet leader himself, but recent studies have redirected the focus of inquiry from Stalin himself to the producers of the cult -- soviet artists, party functionaries, and ordinary people -- with the aim of demonstrating how Soviet citizens assimilated ideology and gave it personal meaning.
In this lecture Ilya Venyavkin will trace the major points in the history of the literary representation of Stalin in the 1930's, analyzing the works of Demyan Bedny, Ilya Selvinsky, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Bulgakov and showing how these writers artistically conceptualized the biography of the leader and his power. Some of these interpretations became part of the official canon, and some of them were instantly dismissed and forgotten.

Ilya Venyavkin is a young Russian scholar affiliated with the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts. He specializes in archival research in the history of Soviet culture during the Stalinist period. He has participated in several prestigious international scholarly conferences and has published a number of highly valuable papers discussing various aspects of cultural and political life in the Soviet Union during the period of the Great Terror.