ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev's speech at the 27th Party Congress revealed serious difficulties and shortcomings in Soviet society; but it may also safely be said that Soviet writers of fiction have long anticipated him on the score. The devastating effect of technological and social change is succinctly presented in a recent povest' by the Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin entitled Pozhar. Of all the contemporary Soviet prose writers, perhaps the most searching in his approach to the past was Yury Trifonov, who died in 1981. In one of his last interviews, he expressed his concern for the whole condition of the human race. The longer-term demoralization resulting from collectivization and the accompanying political campaigns is the theme of Vasil' Bykov's novel Znak bedy. Quoting an aphorism of the historian Yasily Klyuchevskii that a people's lived experience is as important as historical facts, he reproaches Soviet fiction as being generally too preoccupied with facts and with the "enthusiasm of reconstruction."
