Metropol

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

David Gillespie (University of Bath)
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Metropol'

(or

MetrOpol'

, as its compilers preferred), was, according to its founder Viktor Erofeev, “an attempt to struggle with stagnation in the conditions of stagnation”. In the history of post-war Soviet literature, it as significant as the persecution of Boris Pasternak after the publication in Italy of

Doctor Zhivago

in 1957, and the arrest and imprisonment of the writers Andrei Siniavsky and Iulii Daniel' in 1966.

Metropol' was devised by Erofeev in December 1977, and, with the help of Vasilii Aksenov and Evgenii Popov, it was put together in the course of 1978. It emerged as a huge collection of prose and poetry by some of the leading figures in Soviet literature in the 1970s, such as Andrei Bitov, Vladimir Vysotsky, Aksenov, and Bella Akhmadulina. In the tradition of Soviet

524 words

Citation: Gillespie, David. "Metropol". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 November 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1641, accessed 25 November 2024.]

1641 Metropol 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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