Soc. Realist Short Stories/Sketches in English?

[Rebecca Jane Stanton]

Dear Elizabeth,

I'm replying onlist because this is a question I was pondering myself 
earlier in the semester (but not industriously enough to post about it), 
and I suspect that other teachers of 20th-century Russian literature 
would be interested in hearing responses as well.  I don't have time to 
teach a full SR novel in my survey of 20th-century Russian lit. (I only 
get as far as 1969 as it is), but I do feel it's important to expose 
students to a taste of what Russians were *actually* reading in the 
Soviet (pre-glasnost') period.  I can point you to two things I've used 
myself:

(1) A Columbia undergraduate, David Plotz, recently translated a couple 
of very brief excerpts from a SR children's book, which are available here:
http://www.theblueandwhite.org/index.php?page=post&article_id=13

(2) From 1946 to 1991 the Soviet Writers' Union published an 
English-language organ, _Soviet Literature_, which contains (in addition 
to various nonfiction pieces) stories, poems, sketches, and 
serializations of the big SR novels (Pavlenko's _Schastie_, e.g.).  I 
ended up copying for my students a set of three sketches by B. Polevoi 
called "We Are Soviet People," and a shortish piece by L. Mogilevsky 
called "The Turbine" (which backfired slightly because several of my 
current students are of an engineering turn of mind and consider 
turbines underrated as a subject for literature).  But browsing through 
volumes of _SL_ at the library is a great way to come across the kind of 
material you're looking for.

Best,
Rebecca Stanton

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