Russian philology
Vyacheslav Ivanov; novelists such as Mark Aldanov, Gaito Gazdanov and Vladimir Nabokov;
and short story Nobel Prize winning writer Ivan Bunin, continued to write in exile.
The Khrushchev Thaw brought some fresh wind to literature. Poetry became a mass cultural
phenomenon: Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Andrei Voznesensky, and Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, read their poems in stadiums and attracted huge crowds.
Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, like short story writer Varlam Shalamov and
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote about life in the gulag
camps, or Vasily Grossman, with his description of World War II events countering the Soviet
official historiography. They were dubbed "dissidents" and could not publish their major
works until the 1960s.
But the thaw did not last long. In the 1970s, some of the most prominent authors were not
only banned from publishing but were also prosecuted for their anti-Soviet sentiments, or
parasitism