Vasilii Aksenov and the Literature of Convergence: Ostrov Krym as Self-Criticism

As the archetypal young prose writer of the 1960s, Vasilii Aksenov represented the hopes of the Khrushchev generation for the good life and for cultural and political liberalization. Rebelling against the ideological puritanism of socialist realism and the moral imperative of Russian literature, Aksenov’s writing reflected the pleasure principle, hedonism, unofficial popular culture, and the aesthetics of consumption. He perceived life as a multicolored, multinational carnival, which became the backdrop of his heroes’ adolescent identity crises and later problems of mid-life and aging. In response to Stalinism, war, and Soviet ideological bombast, Aksenov and his generation created a literature with a clearly western orientation; experimental, playful, and linguistically subversive, it was optimistic, but not in the socialist realist sense.