THE IDEOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC FEATURES
OF THE VSEVOLOD IVANOV’S NOVEL “LENIN AVENUE” (“PROSPECT IL’ICHA”)
AS A FACT OF “RETURNED LITERATURE”

The article is devoted to the novel by Vsevolod Ivanov “Lenin Avenue”, written by him in
1942. The plot of the novel unfolds against the background of the events of the great Patriotic
war. The article is the first scientific work devoted to the late-published novel by Ivanov. The
ideological and aesthetic connection with the previous novel by Vsevolod Ivanov “Volcano”,
which was conceived and written on the eve of the Second World War, is considered in detail.
The fate of both novels was dramatic: both novels were first printed on archival materials only
after the writer’s death. The novel “Volcano” was published in 1966, and “Lenin Avenue” only in
2016. Both novels were published in the magazine “Siberian lights”. The creative history and
history of the failed publication of the novel “Lenin Avenue” are considered in the article on the
basis of the diary of Vsevolod Ivanov published in 2001. The author shows the historicism of the
writer’s artistic thinking and the depth of his thoughts, which were not in tune with the dynamic
time of the military storm. Despite the fact that both novels are associated with the poetics and
aesthetics of socialist realism, the individual features of the style and the historical concept of the
novel made publication impossible. Features of similarity and difference with Ivanov's sketches of
wartime which were printed on pages of the Soviet Newspapers are shown. Ivanov's experience is
considered in the broad context of fiction and propaganda literature of the time when the novel
“Lenin Avenue” was conceived and created (I. Ehrenburg, K. Simonov, V. Lebedev-Kumach).
It is convincingly shown that the novel was ahead of its time, and is associated with the literature
about the war, which was created in the following decades (V. Nekrasov, B. Polevoj, “lieutenant’s
prose”). The work on the novel reflected the writer’s idea of the need for an urgent creation
of a great novel that would reproduce the features of the wartime, and would combine the task of
propaganda propaganda with elements of historical analysis and forecast. The General mechanisms
of the phenomenon of “returned literature”, the peaks of which fell on the years of
“ottepel’” and “perestroika” are shown on the particular example of the novel “Lenin Avenue”.
The novel “Lenin Avenue” is considered in connection with other books of the writer (“Kremlin”
and “U”), not published in due time, and books of other Soviet writers who reached the reader
many years after their creation.