A theoretical approach to the roman of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union during the stalinism and the Khrushchev’s thaw

Authors

  • Adolfo José Calero Abadía Universidad Central de Venezuela

Abstract

This article presents a useful theoretical approach to define and explain a novelistic typology –so far no determined as a corpus– whose thematic and poetic core focuses on the political, sociological and psychological aspects of the Soviet Union and, more specifically, in the periods governed by Iósif Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, considering both stages as consecutive moments of the same totalitarian system. Here, we proposed how the works belonging to this novelistic typology –which we’ll call the Roman of Totalitarianism– uses the resource of a political conscience that allows its enunciation from a need to denounce the forms of totalitarian oppression, in order to materialize in a text whose form and meaning synthesize the various aspects of such oppression.

Keywords:

Totalitarism, Weil, Koestler, Serge, Métter, Ribakov