Silver Age and After: Repressed Russian Poets, Artists and Philosophers during the Soviet Period

The details of the Jewish Holocaust have become part of our history through the testimony of those who survived the death camps. The details of Lenin's and Stalin's reign of terror are far less known because they took place behind a wall of secrecy, and because survivors have been loath to speak about them for fear of retribution.

This is an encompassing volume presenting an intense display, as complete as can be, of poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers and intellectual actors implicated in different aspects of Russian life roughly through the period 1900-1960. They were people who had lived under the Soviet regime in times of peace and in times of war, from the Red Terror through the Great Terror. One must bear in mind the political and economic conditions in which those lives developed: the one-party rule placed above both the government and the citizens, the abashment of the division of powers, the suppression of private property and private economic initiative, the political police, and the GULAG.

I deal with the poets in several chapters, then theater directors, then composers, then philosophers (these both in the introduction and in the play at the end of the book).

Besides the Prologue and Introduction, the reader will find an Index of historical names, plus an extensive Bibliography. The work can be used for reference, for classroom adoption, for researchers/practitioners of Russian Literature, Political Studies, Slavic Studies, and Russian History.

Roberto Echavarren is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he studied philosophy and law. He then pursued graduate studies in Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Paris VIII. Echavarren taught at the University of London before a twenty-year career teaching at New York University. He has published five novels, notably his last three short novels combined under the title 'Archipiélago' (Archipelago). He was awarded the 2021 Amado Alonso International Prize of Literary Criticism for his book 'El pensamiento chino' (Chinese Thought). In 2022 and 2023 he published 'One Against All, Lenin and his Legacy, ' and 'Russian Nights: Autocracy and Testimony, ' plus an anthology of his verse, 'Verde escarabajo.'