Article was published in the «Slavic Review» — 1988 — Vol. 47 — No. 4 (Winter) — p. 642-651.
As the archetypal young prose writer of the 1960s, Vasilii Aksenov represented the hopes of the Khrushchev generation for the good life and for cultural and political liberalization. Rebelling against the ideological puritanism of socialist realism and the moral imperative of Russian literature, Aksenov's writing reflected the pleasure principle, hedonism, unofficial popular culture, and the aesthetics of consumption. He perceived life as a multicolored, multinational carnival, which became the backdrop of his heroes' adolescent identity crises and later problems of mid-life and aging. In response to Stalinism, war, and Soviet ideological bombast, Aksenov and his generation created a literature with a clearly western orientation; experimental, playful, and linguistically subversive, it was optimistic, but not in the socialist realist sense. Like many western and Soviet liberals of the 1960s, young Aksenov believed in the peaceful coexistence of socialism and capitalism and the eventual convergence of the two political systems. Developed in the 1950s by western social scientists, the convergence thesis was a response to postindustrial society as shaped by modern science and technology. According to the theory, in the space age capitalism and socialism would become indistinguishable in spite of ideological differences.' Internationally, the threat of mutual annihilation prompted the theory of convergence. In the Soviet Union, the reformist intelligentsia adopted it in the hope that Stalinist Russia could be transformed into a democratic, technologically advanced society.
