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Some of the greatest novels of all time were written by Russians. Writers like Fyodor Dostoyevski, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev are seen as some of the greatest novelists of all time. Most of the great Russian novels were written in pre-Soviet times.
The only Soviet era that impressed me was Mikhail Sholokhov And Quiet Flows the Don.
The shift from great works to hack writing was no accident. The same restrictions on free speech and free thought are a major part of why the Soviet Union failed. Actually there were important novels written during the Soviet by writers like Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but these were authors Soviet authors attempted to supress and their works were not published in the Soiviet Union. They had to be sureptiously smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West. Unfortunately, while I have read several Russian novels, it was several tears ago before I began working on HBC. So we will have ro rely on reader input for our assessment here. Here we are not attempting literary criticm, but raher mine these works for information about fashion. Novels written in contemporary tomes often include some useful fashion/clothing information. This is often informtion that can not be induced from photograpgs or catalogs. The descriptions aboutclothing or fashion conventions are particularly useful, although we stress that this this is the case when the novelsare set in contemporary times, meaning the setting of the novel is the time in which the author lived.
Valentin Kataev was a notable Soviet-era Russian novelist and playwright. As a young man he fought with the Red Army. After the Civil War he began working as a journalist and then turned to writing novels and plays. Somehow managed to craft insightful works describing Soviet social conditions without violating the standards of Sopviet censors. Very few notable authors were able to accomplish this. One of his most beloved books is Beleyet parus odinoky/A White Sail Gleams (1936). Russian readers will immediately recognize both the book and the date, Kataev published it in the midst of the Great Terror. It was a popular success in Russia and immediately turned iinto a movie (1937). Here is a screenshot from the film. The story is about revolutional events of 1905 in Russia from the point of view of two small boys - one Petya, from the family of a school teacher, and second Gavrik, son of a poor fisherman. Here we see Petya in his sailor suit. Here is a translation from Kataev's book with a description of his clothes: "Petya wore his city Sunday suit, which he had quite outgrown during the summer: a navy-blue woollen sailor blouse with a white-edged collar, short trousers, long lisle stockings, button-shoes, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. .... All summer long Petya had run about practically naked. He was now as brown as an Indian and could walk barefoot over burrs and thorns. He had gone swimming three times a day. At the beach he used to smear himself from head to foot with the red marine clay and then scratch out designs on his chest. That made him really look like a Red Indian, especially when he stuck into his hair the blue feathers of those marvellously beautiful birds—real fairy-tale birds—which built their nests in the bluff. And now, after all that wealth and freedom, to have to walk about in a tight woollen sailor blouse, in prickly stockings, in shoes that pinched, and in a big straw hat with an elastic that rubbed against his ears and pressed into his neck!"
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