ABSTRACT
“Socialism will free woman from the fetters of the family and the slavery of the household”, runs a popular Bolshevist slogan. The large number of Russian novels devoted exclusively to the problem of women, and especially of girls, and to their attitude towards men, their position in the new society, in the State, and at work, show that even in the Union a woman is not an automaton, and that phenomena that have existed for centuries or, as some think, eternally, are not to be demolished in a short decade and a half. A girl occupies the centre of Fiodor Gladkov’s novel, “Exuberant Sun”. The position of the young Russian in the Soviet State is simpler than that of his girl contemporary. The conditions of development in the Union are hard, masculine, even military; they demand physical strength, ruthlessness, and the exchange of the four walls of home for life in public, in the collective.
