“Healers of Wounded Souls”: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944-1946

The sharp disjunction between the revered image of the family reunited and the actual lives of millions of Soviet people came to focus in wartime and postwar literature, as well as in professional literary debates. In 1943, writers, literary critics, playwrights, and poets began to argue publicly that the image represented deep social anxieties about the postwar future. In their work, they approached the problem primarily from the perspective of the returning male veteran. The new hero of Socialist Realist literature was physically and psychologically mutilated. With limbs missing and faces mutilated, minds depressed or hysterical, men in the new Soviet novel cried in their hospital beds from helplessness, self-disgust, and the seeming impossibility of even imagining themselves part of normal family life. The literature of the period is also characterized by silence about female trauma: it balanced troubled male personalities with physically whole and psychologically integrated women, eager to mother and share their vital energies. Soviet writers elevated the traumatized soldier to a central position in wartime and postwar novels as part of their self-ascribed and publicly pronounced mission to heal the injuries to veterans’ “souls.” Addressing urgent social issues, Soviet literati articulated war trauma and attempted to reconcile mutilated bodies and minds with the image of family happiness depicted in the Ogonek photo. This article examines the writers’ healing mission as an intrinsically gendered undertaking, of different value to men and women – an undertaking that constituted a crucial moment in shaping the public history of the Soviet experience in World War II.