ABSTRACT
Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Stalin in the new version of The First Circle manifests some similarities to, but also considerable differences from, other fictional depictions of Stalin both in the USSR and in the west. An examination of other literary portraits of Stalin helps to highlight the originality of Solzhenitsyn's conception, as well as to provide a measure by which the literary qualities and historical accuracy of his portrait can be judged. A character more obviously recognisable as Stalin was depicted by Boris Pilnyak, in his Tale of the Unextinguished Moon. The personal interest which Stalin took in Mandelstam's case, as in Pilnyak's, once again demonstrates the seriousness with which Stalin regarded literary references to himself. The last phase of Stalinism was an unpromising period for anti-Stalinist satire, but one rare example of a children's story of the 1940s which uses 'Aesopian language' to criticise Stalin was Lev Kassil's Tale of the Three Master Craftsmen (1949).
