Valentin Pikul

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Valentin Pikul
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Born (1928-07-13)July 13, 1928
Leningrad, Soviet Union
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Riga, Latvia
Language Russian
Genre fiction
Notable works At the Last Frontier,
Requiem for Convoy PQ-17

Valentin Savvich Pikul (Russian: Валенти́н Са́ввич Пи́куль) (July 13, 1928 - July 16, 1990) was a popular and prolific Soviet historical novelist of Ukrainian-Russian heritage. He lived and worked in Riga.

Pikul's novels were grounded in extensive research, blending historical and fictional characters and often focusing on Russian nationalistic themes. Pikul's best-selling 1978 novel At the Last Frontier was a dramatized telling of Rasputin's influence over the Russian imperial court. Richard Stites says he was "a name hardly known to literary scholars but the most widely read author in the Soviet Union from the seventies to today [i.e., 1991]... Pikul's works were wildly popular in the book market (in the years 1967–1979 over a million copies were printed), but politically controversial because of his ardent patriotism which was sometimes expressed in thinly veiled Russian nationalism."[1] According to Natalya Ivanova:

History in his interpretation acquired market value, and the circulation of his national-romantic “novels” left Bulat Okudzhava’s and Yury Davydov’s books far behind. Pikul owed his popularity not only to a method depending on adventure and simplification. His national-patriotic ideology, hostile to the official and liberal internationalism of the day, drew the readers indifferent to schematic representations of history by Soviet scholars like a magnet. Pikul developed and consistently used the propaganda mechanism successfully exploited by mass culture to captivate the minds of unprepared audiences.[2]

Little of Pikul's work has been translated into English. In May 2001 a seagoing minesweeper of the Black Sea Fleet was named in his honor.

Works

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture (Cambridge UP, 1992, repr. 1995), p. 151.
  2. ↑ Natalya Ivanova, "A New Mosaic out of Old Fragments: Soviet History Re-Codified in Modern Russian Prose" (Conference Papers, Stanford University, October 1998), pp. 25-26.

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