Aleksandr Tvardovskii: Memory and Truth in the Soviet Union - Professor Geoffrey Hosking

Alexandr Tvardovskii (1910-1971) was not only one of the finest, most popular and most important poets of his epoch, but also (from 1950-1954 and 1958-1970) the editor of Novy Mir, which until the 1970s was the most prominent Soviet literary journal of the post-war period and which, in November 1962, published Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. As Robert Chandler (the outstanding translator of Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov) has rightly said, “Tvardovskii’s significance cannot be overstated.” We are therefore delighted that the Society’s Honorary President, Professor Geoffrey Hosking, has agreed to talk to us about the book he has recently had published with the title “Aleksandr Tvardovskii: Memory and Truth in the Soviet Union”.

The book is a detailed biography of the writer and journal editor who probably changed the literary culture of the Soviet Union more than any other person in the two decades after Stalin's death. In it Geoffrey Hosking shows how Tvardovskii gradually evolved from being an ardent Stalinist who renounced his own so-called “kulak” family to becoming a convinced advocate of tolerance, an all-human (rather than class-based) morality, civil rights and free literary creativity. To understand Tvardovskii better is to understand why the Soviet intelligentsia changed so fundamentally in the USSR’s final decades, a change that helps to explain the rise of Gorbachev 20 years later. The book - while avowedly not a work of literary criticism - includes an in-depth analysis of Tvardovskii’s major works, which also helps us to better understand the fate of culture under an authoritarian regime and the daunting challenges of the struggle against censorship.

In his talk to the Society Geoffrey Hosking (who declares the book to have been “a work of love”) will tell us what motivated him to write about Tvardovskii at this point and why he considers Tvardovskii to be such an important figure from the cultural and societal point of view and of such great continuing relevance today. Above all, Tvardovskii passionately believed in the importance of revealing the truth of what had happened and was happening to the Soviet peoples. As he said in his last major poem:

«Кто прячет прошлое ревниво, / Тот вряд ли с будущим в ладу.» // “Whoever jealously hides the past / Will hardly be on good terms with the future.”

Professor Geoffrey Hosking is one of the most eminent British historians of Russia and the Soviet Union and has had a distinguished academic career, as well as writing a number of authoritative books on Russian and Soviet history .He studied Russian at King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded an MA, before studying Russian history at Moscow State University. He then studied European history at St. Antony's College, Oxford, before receiving a PhD in modern Russian history at Cambridge. He taught at the University of Essex as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and then Reader from 1966 to 1984, before joining the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College, London, where he held the chair of Russian History as  Professor from 1984 to 2007. He also held a Leverhulme Research Professorship in Russian History at SSEES from 1999 to 2004.

He has been a visiting lecturer in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a research fellow at Columbia University's Russian Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Cologne. In 1988 he presented the BBC Reith Lectures, in the course of which he explained the dramatic changes of the Mikhail Gorbachev era with reference to their historical context. To mention but two of his published works on the pre-Soviet period, his books Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (1998) and Russia and the Russians (2001) are both widely recognised for their comprehensive coverage and immaculate attention to detail, as well as being eminently readable. Professor Hosking was awarded the OBE in the 2015 New Year Honours List for services to higher education and to students. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.