Lidiia Nikolaevna Seifullina
Lidiia Nikolaevna Seifullina was a notable Soviet writer born on March 22, 1889, near Chelyabinsk. Raised by her maternal grandmother after her mother’s early death, she received a formal education thanks to her father, a village priest of Tatar descent. Seifullina began her writing career in her twenties while juggling various jobs, contributing to the literary journal *Sibirskie ogni* in Novosibirsk. Her early works often explored themes of transformation, featuring female characters evolving from self-centered individuals to dedicated revolutionaries, alongside poignant stories of children affected by the preceding regime. However, the political climate shifted dramatically in the 1930s under Stalin, leading to increased censorship that stifled her creative expression. Following her husband's persecution during the Great Terror and her own subsequent scrutiny, she published fewer works and faced harsh criticism for her wartime stories. Eventually imprisoned during World War II, she was released after Stalin's death, and she passed away on April 25, 1954, in Moscow. Seifullina's literary legacy reflects the complexities and challenges of a writer navigating a turbulent socio-political landscape.
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Lidiia Nikolaevna Seifullina
Writer
- Born: March 22, 1889
- Birthplace: Near Chelyabinsk, Russia
- Died: April 25, 1954
- Place of death: Moscow, Russia
Biography
Lidiia Nikolaevna Seifullina was born in a village near Chelyabinsk, a city in the southern Urals, on March 22, 1889. Her mother, a peasant, died when Lidiia was only five years old. As a result she and her sister were brought up almost entirely by their maternal grandmother. Her father, who was of Tatar origin, was the son of an Orthodox priest and himself had become a village priest. He was able to get Lidiia a formal education, but the stories she heard from her peasant grandmother gave her a rich trove of motifs for her later writing.
Seifullina found her first job at seventeen, and by her twenties she was publishing regularly, although she still held a wide variety of day jobs to pay her bills. During the early 1920’s she lived in Novosibirsk, where she was involved in the launching of a regional literary journal, Sibirskie ogni (Siberian lights), which published some of her own work. Her writings often featured female characters who are transformed from selfish pleasure-seekers to committed revolutionaries and builders of the new Soviet state. She also wrote stories of orphaned children under the old regime, and even a few rather sentimental portrayals of village life.
By the 1930’s, the literary scene was rapidly changing, largely as a result of the rise of Joseph Stalin to power. In the 1920’s, the focus of many Soviet writers had been upon the overcoming of backwardness on an individual basis, but in the 1930’s writing, as everything else in the Soviet Union, was becoming increasingly centralized. There was no longer any room for Seifullina’s frank and often shocking portrayals of the complexity of village life in a world where collectivization was supposed to transform the peasantry into a rural proletariat. As a result she began to write less, and by 1934 she felt it necessary to explain the reasons for her relative silence. The few stories and novels she did produce during this period show clear evidence of self-censorship in an effort to make her themes and characters more palatable to the authorities.
Seifullina’s husband fell victim to the Great Terror in 1939, and after that she fell under a cloud of suspicion that limited her opportunities for publication. During World War II, she did publish a few patriotic stories, but even they were harshly attacked by the critics and she was finally sent to a prison camp, not to be released until after Stalin’s death. Seifullina died on April 25, 1954, in Moscow.