ABSTRACT
Some writers of political novels working outside the USSR have also felt the need to come to terms with Stalin and the totalitarian system he embodied, both in his lifetime and after his death. Stalin has continued to fascinate western writers, who use his image to explore the nature of the Soviet regime and the implications of totalitarianism. Hostile portraits of Stalin produced in the post-Stalin era by Soviet writers whose works were published first in the west hold considerable interest for both the literary scholar and the historian. Guitar poetry, which rose to prominence in the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s, also concerned with the consequences of Stalinism. In the post-Stalin period some Soviet writers who had suffered in the Stalin era, several of them former prisoners, became fascinated by the figure of Stalin and wished to present their own, more convincing portraits of the dictator to contrast with the cautious.
