The Origins of Post-Stalin Individuality: Aleksandr Tvardovskii and the Evolution of 1930s Soviet Romanticism ANATOLY PINSKY I n July 1953 the Soviet poet Aleksandr Tvardovskii, in his capacity as a member of the Central Auditing Commission, attended a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist party. 1 This was among the first Central Committee plena after the death of Joseph Stalin, in March of that year, and witnessed the first official criticism of Stalin’s “cult of personality.” The event had thus given Tvardovskii, a three-time Stalin Prize winner, a lot to think about. In his diary on July 11, several days after the event, Tvardovskii reflected on the late leader: “[Stalin] created such spiritual discipline of millions of people around his name that [this spiritual discipline] to an important extent stripped all of them, without a single exception, of the personality (lichnosti) and the smallest independence of thought, if not feeling.” Tvardovskii, later in the entry, labeled Stalin and what he had created the “main theme of the epoch.” 2 Tvardovskii had thus begun to prioritize a peculiar brand of epistemological autonomy—a term I use interchangeably with individuality—or the principle that individuals For their comments on versions of this essay, I am grateful to Polly Jones, Boris Wolfson, Jochen Hellbeck, Catriona Kelly, Jonathan Platt, Jan Plamper, Samuel Hirst, Guillaume Sauvé, Richard Wortman, Brandon Schechter; participants in the November 2013 conference, “VDNKh-7,” at the European University at St. Petersburg, the March 2014 conference, “Writing and Reading Russian Biography in the 19 th and 20 th Centuries,” at the University of Oxford, the April 2014 conference, “After Stalin: Subjectivity in the Late Soviet Union, 1953–1985,” also at the European University; and the editors and reviewers at Russian Review. I also wish to thank the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute, where, as a visiting scholar in spring 2016, I completed the final revisions for this article; and Valentina Tvardovskaia, Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s daughter, for kindly discussing with me some of the sources analyzed and ideas presented. 1 Established in 1917, the Tsentral'naia revizionnaia komissiia “inspect[ed] the speed and accuracy with which business is transacted by the central organs of the Party.” See Joseph L. Wieczynski, ed., The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, vol. 6 (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1978), 165. 2 Aleksandr Tvardovskii, Dnevnik, 1950–1959 (Moscow, 2013), 85–86 (July 11, 1953). The Russian Review 76 (July 2017): 458–83 Copyright 2017 The Russian Review