The sixth episode of the podcast is about “A ticket to the stars” by Vasili Aksyonov (1932-2009), published in 1961. Although Soviet officials vehemently denied its existence, after the Second World War the Soviet Union saw the emergence of a relatively independent youth culture. Youngsters developed their own dress code, spoke in slang, and demonstrated an outspoken preference for Western music. A testament to this development, Vasily Aksyonov’s “A Ticket to the Stars” quickly gained the status of a cult book, especially after the authorities tried to limit its accessibility. In this episode we focus on Aksyonov’s sparkling youth novel and the authorities' relentless attempts to defuse it. It will also become clear how persistent Stalinism was in the 1950s, even in the thinking and language of the most outspoken anti-Stalinists.
Sources used in this episode of "Scandal and Controversy in Russian Literature":
- Boele, Otto. 2016. “The Soviet Abroad (That We Lost): The Fate of Vasilii Aksenov’s Cult Novel ‘A Starry Ticket’ on Paper and on Screen,” in: Border Crossing. Russian Literature into Film, edited by Alexander Burry and Frederick H. White (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 223-238.
- Clark, Katerina. 2000. The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual, 3d edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
- Fürst, Juliane. 2010. Stalin’s Last Generation. Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- Gorsuch, Anne. 2011. All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- Graffy, Julian. 2005. “Film Adaptations of Aksenov. The Young Prose and the Cinema of the Thaw,” in: Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900-2001, edited by Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitskaia, pp. 100-115.
- Horton, Andrew and Michael Brashinsky. 1992. The Zero Hour. Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
- Kozlov, Denis. 2013. The Readers of Novyi Mir. Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press).
- Petrov, Dmitrii. 2012. Aksenov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia).
- Prokhorov, Aleksandr. 2007. Unasledovannyi diskurs: paradigmy stalinskoi kul’tury v literature i kinematografe ‘ottepeli’ (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt).
List of translations used in this episode of "Scandal and Controversy in Russian Literature":
- Aksyonov, Vasili. 1962. A Starry Ticket (A Ticket to the Stars). Translated by Alec Brown (London: Putnam & Co. Ltd.).
All other translations were done by Otto Boele.
© Otto Boele & Electrical Films 2024
