For many, governments offer guidance and reliance; citizens enjoy security, order, and direction from their political leaders. Yet some forms of government — specifically Communism — cause instability, confusion, and distraction in the lives of their citizens. In Maria Reva’s short story “Novostroika,” she depicts the animosity of a young Ukrainian man, Daniil Blinov, who battles the oppressions of Communist life. In his position, Danill struggles to keep his family satiated under the dominion of the U.S.S.R. This leads to various dilemmas throughout the piece. Within this story, Reva incorporates a space heater, a symbol of hope, and a coffin, a symbol of oppression, to convey how Communism crushes the hope of its citizens.
Reva establishes this short-lived hope within the first symbol: a space heater. In doing so, she shifts from a persistent defeated outlook to an encouraging perspective on the characters’ dilemmas. The Blinov family procures the space heater with Daniel's grandfather’s life savings, which he had “been keeping for hard times, and hard times had arrived” (Reva 227). Congruently, they had “enough [...] to buy one space heater,” allowing the situation to resemble fate. At this moment, the symbol emerges within the story. Now, the characters have a tangible item to prosper from, to grant them perseverance. In this story, set in 1988, the U.S.S.R. began to rapidly decay. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s new reform in place, the people found a new voice. In turn,
“The Communist threat inside the country has been magnified and exalted far beyond its realities”(273). Accusations have been made, irresponsible citizens are spreading fears. Multiples of suspicions had been made. Innocents are being considered as disloyalty. “Suspicion grows until only the person who loudly proclaims the orthodox view, or who, once having been a Communist, has been converted, is trustworthy” (273). Suspects are those who are unorthodox, who does not followed military policymakers. The fear has driven citizens to the folds of the orthodox. The fear was to be investigated, to lose one’s job, etc. These fears have driven many people to sorrow. These fears have effected younger generations. “This pattern of orthodoxy that is shaping our thinking has dangerous implications” (274). Douglas believes the great danger if we become victims of the orthodox school. They can limit our ability to change or alter. Douglas believes a man’s mind must be free.
Everyone needs hope in their lives for the good times and the bad. Hope is an essential part of human life, which is sometimes symbolized into objects. Legend by Marie Lu is a dystopian story about Day, a slum sector teen criminal, and June, a wealthy military prodigy. Marie Lu uses Day’s pendant to symbolize the hope and freedom Day and June yearn for.
In Anzia Yezierska's short story "The lost beautifulness," the protagonist Hanneh Hayyeh scrimps and saves to be able to paint her apartment white to make it look respectable for her son Ady when he comes home from fighting World War I. Hayyeh wants some kind of hope to cling to in her desperate immigrant's life. Although the dialect of the characters is Russian-Jewish and the setting is in an early 20th century urban environment, the idea of immigrant aspirations and the conflict between rich and poor is a common theme in American literature.
Set at the end of the Cold War in East Germany, the movie Goodbye Lenin is the story of a young man, Alex, trying to protect his mother, Christiane, who just spent the last eight months in a coma. Christiane is a personification of the values and ideology of socialism. She carries them out in her interactions with society, and is very hopeful towards the success of the regime. During her absence, the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the German Democratic Republic leads to a radical and turbulent change in society: the fall of socialism and the triumph of capitalism. Because of the shocking effect of such information and the danger of another heart attack, Alex creates for Christiane an ideological form of socialism. Fundamental themes in the movie are the difference between ideal and reality of socialism, as well as the positive and negative aspects of the transition to free market capitalism. Such themes are carried out through a juxtaposition of an ideal society and its reality in the form of a constructed reality of socialism. This idealized version of socialism served as an oasis from the chaotic transition from a problematic socialist regime to free market capitalism.
The Great Terror was one of the single greatest loss of lives in the history of the world. It was a crusade of political tyranny in the Soviet Union that transpired during the late 1930’s. The Terrors implicated a wide spread cleansing of the Communist Party and government officials, control of peasants and the Red Army headship, extensive police over watch, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and illogical slayings. Opportunely, some good did come from the terrors nonetheless. Two of those goods being Sofia Petrovna and Requiem. Both works allow history to peer back into the Stalin Era and bear witness to the travesties that came with it. Through the use of fictional story telling and thematic devises Sofia Petrovna and Requiem, respectively, paint a grim yet descriptive picture in a very efficient manner.
In their lives a distant and cold character exists. When the war began in Sarajevo the men on the hills cut off the city’s water. Kenan’s elderly neighbor Mrs. Ristovski thrusted her plastic bottles towards him when he opened the door and all she said was “A promise is a promise.” and left him standing at the doorway. Even before the war Mrs. Ristovski had always acted abrasively; knocking on their door early in the morning and complaining about their first born’s crying. Not once has she shown
In “A Guide to a Renamed City” Joseph Brodsky wrote that at a certain point Saint-Petersburg became dependent on its reflection in the mirror, namely the literature. After walking Moscow's streets this June as much as I did in my university years, I made sure for myself what the Moscow's reflection is. It's a nightmare, full of unworked-through traumas and fears, which it tries to bury again, this time in memory, with the help of multiplying asphalt layers and myriads of fake facades and squares.
The strive for socialism goes far beyond the torture and rape of an unfortunate few, rather the idea that everything under communism was free and that there was no such thing as selling products for profits would lead to “the greatest human disaster in Europe since the Black Death.” Still, many more unfortunate others found themselves on market displays to be sold as food. Even with the prospect of cannibalism and the terror that Lenin’s secret police caused, the masses still believed that he was their savor and didn’t know anything of the horrors that occurred under his rule. Many families worshipped Lenin as a god and to speak otherwise was seen as a great disrespect. The amount of hope that they poured into Lenin and his idea of communism just serves to show how desperate the Russian people had become.
There is not a single country in this hemisphere which has not been penetrated by the apparatus of International Communism … The Communist conspiracy is not to be taken lightly. It’s agents operate under the iron discipline of the Soviet Communist Party acting as the self-proclaimed “General Staff of the World Proletariat.” The agents themselves, in order to gain a following pretend to be reformists seeking to eradicate the evils which exist in any society.
Communist performs a moment in the life of a family as the connections that bind them together start to loosen before their eyes. The common tone of the short story is definitely sad. There is also a definite image that was involved in the plot of the story, which stresses the storyteller at the end of the story like the event as a whole bothers him as he tries to move on with his life. Communist performs a moment in the life of a family as the connections that bind them together start to loosen before their eyes. The common tone of the short story is definitely sad. There is also a definite image that was involved in the plot of the story, which stresses the storyteller at the end of the story like the event as a whole bothers him as he tries
”(194).Lenina is the major character closest to the average World State citizen. Her resistance of the conditioning shows that everyone in the World State has the potential to the same, which would disrupt the social order and lead to
Were it a testimony to the rigors and cruelness of human nature, it would be crushing. As it is, it shatters our perception of man and ourselves as no other book, besides perhaps Anne Franke`s diary and the testimony of Elie Wiesl, could ever have done. The prisoners of the labor camp, as in Shukhov?s predicament, were required to behave as Soviets or face severe punishment. In an almost satirical tone Buinovsky exclaims to the squadron that ?You?re not behaving like Soviet People,? and went on saying, ?You?re not behaving like communist.? (28) This type of internal monologue clearly persuades a tone of aggravation and sarcasm directly associated to the oppression?s of communism.
The purpose of this analysis is to show how the themes of the novel are loosely based on the events in the soviet union, and the similarities between the world of big brother and Joseph Stalin’s communistic leadership.
From Stalin’s Cult of Personality to Khrushchev’s period of De-Stalinization, the nation of the Soviet Union was in endless disarray of what to regard as true in the sense of a socialist direction. The short story, This is Moscow Speaking, written by Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) represents the ideology that the citizens of the USSR were constantly living in fear of the alternations of their nation’s political policies. Even more, the novella gives an explanation for the people’s desire to conform to the principles around them.
Throughout his novel Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman provides numerous occasions for defining freedom. In the midst of attempting to give meaning to freedom, Grossman greatly invests in wrestling with the issue of why freedom is still absent within Russia although the country has seen success in many different ways. Through the idea and image of the Revolution stems Capitalism, Leninism, and Stalinism. Grossman contends that freedom is an inexorable occurrence and that “to live means to be free”, that it is simply the nature of human kind to be free (200-204). The lack of freedom expresses a lack of humanity in Russia, and though freedom never dies, if freedom does not exist in the first place, then it has no chance to be kept alive. Through Grossman’s employment of the Revolution and the ideas that stem from it, he illustrates why freedom is still absent from Russian society, but more importantly why the emergence of freedom is inevitable.