"And There in the Postwar Silence": Olga Berggolts and Postwar Soviet Subjectivity, 1945-1954
Location
King Building 325
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
4-28-2017 4:30 PM
End Date
4-28-2017 5:50 PM
Abstract
Most famous for her work as the voice of Radio Leningrad during World War II, poet and propagandist Olga Berggolts extolled the glories of the Soviet Union. But her postwar diaries and poems tell a different story, one of intermittent disillusion and indignation, but also wholehearted faith. While she experienced the catastrophic suffering of the war as an ennobling, indeed uplifting experience, for her, the postwar period was much more difficult. In this, she was not unique. This project explores how people’s attitudes to the Soviet regime changed in the wake of a catastrophic war and the triumph of victory. It simultaneously uses Berggolts’s poetry as a lens by which to understand feelings that could not be written or talked about otherwise under Stalin. Berggolts gives voice to the private ideological struggles that ordinary communists experienced behind closed doors.
Keywords:
Soviet Union, poetry, creative freedom, communism, faith
Recommended Citation
Posner, Lillian, ""And There in the Postwar Silence": Olga Berggolts and Postwar Soviet Subjectivity, 1945-1954" (04/28/17). Senior Symposium. 52.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/seniorsymp/2017/presentations/52
Major
History; Russian & East European Studies
Award
Artz Honors Research Grant
Advisor(s)
Annemarie Sammartino, History
Tom Newlin, Environmental Studies
Project Mentor(s)
Annemarie Sammartino, History
Christopher Stolarski, History
April 2017
"And There in the Postwar Silence": Olga Berggolts and Postwar Soviet Subjectivity, 1945-1954
King Building 325
Most famous for her work as the voice of Radio Leningrad during World War II, poet and propagandist Olga Berggolts extolled the glories of the Soviet Union. But her postwar diaries and poems tell a different story, one of intermittent disillusion and indignation, but also wholehearted faith. While she experienced the catastrophic suffering of the war as an ennobling, indeed uplifting experience, for her, the postwar period was much more difficult. In this, she was not unique. This project explores how people’s attitudes to the Soviet regime changed in the wake of a catastrophic war and the triumph of victory. It simultaneously uses Berggolts’s poetry as a lens by which to understand feelings that could not be written or talked about otherwise under Stalin. Berggolts gives voice to the private ideological struggles that ordinary communists experienced behind closed doors.
Notes
Session III, Panel 19 - Russian | Narratives
Moderator: Arlene Forman, Chair and Associate Professor of Russian & East European Studies