After reading through a small sampling of Twentieth Century Russian Literature, including Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, Vassily Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I became interested in how Russian Literature both echoes and deviates from the lives of the men and women who actually experienced these events. On this website, my goal is to not only tell the story of Pavel Litvinov (Павел Литвинов), but also to explore the ways in which his life paralleled and deviated from the accounts told in these four works of Russian Literature.
I was particularly interested in writing about Pavel Litvinov, as he was my high school physics teacher, and he truly inspired me not only as a teacher but as a person. By completing this project, I wanted to separate fact from fiction and to learn more about the man who I had come to know and respect, but whose life was still relatively unknown to me.
I have found through my research that Pavel Litvinov was very much a part of the same literary circle as Boris Pasternak, Vassily Aksyonov and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. It may not seem fair to be using these at least partially fictional narratives in order to understand the life of Pavel Litvinov, but all of these authors were working towards the same goal -- to obtain literary and physical freedom in Russia. While Pavel Litvinov did not create a novel of the same critical acclaim as the other authors mentioned on this website, he was certainly working towards the same objectives and it is only through looking at numerous accounts of the same events that we can begin to understand what it would have been like to live in Russia under the rule of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev.
I think that Pavel Litvinov summarized his mission best in February, 19 in a letter signed by himself and twelve other Soviet citizens, including Larissa Daniels. The letter read:
"We consider it out duty to draw attention to the fact that there are in prisons and camps several thousand of political prisoners, about whom almost no one knows. Theyare held in inhuman conditions of compulsory labor, on a semi-starvation diet, abandoned to the arbitrary actions of the administration."