«Mikulina». The literary and political project: criticism from below article one

Annotation

“Elena Mikulina” — almost no one remembers this writer’s name today. A Stalinist appointee in the year of the Great Breakthrough, who studied at a provincial party school and had no life experience, became an author for whom all doors of publishing houses and publications were open. The literary and political project that Mikulina was involved in was based on the assumption that a simple story by a “people’s girl” would spark widespread interest in the competition across the country, which would have a significant impact on the economy and political climate in the Soviet Union, as well as strengthen the already unshakable authority of the leader. However, the very first book written by Mikulina based on a specific ideological assignment and documented facts caused a scandal due to the glaring discrepancy between the literary description and reality. The book’s initiator was Stalin, who wrote a preface to it and made it famous, and later defended it from public criticism by comparing it to Sholokhov’s novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”, in which Stalin believed that the author had made “crude mistakes” that were even worse than Mikulina’s. However, Mikulina’s “project” ultimately failed due to its lack of literary or ideological merit. It was the first attempt at socialist realism before the advent of socialist realism.

Keywords

Mikulina, Stalin, Sholokhov, the idea and practice of social competition, journalism, propaganda, a literary and political project, criticism from below

Literature

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The study was funded by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation No. 24–18–00636,
https://rscf.ru/project/24–18–00636/; the Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy named after
Fyodor Dostoevsky.