Identity area
Reference code
Title
Date(s)
- 1935-1944 (Creation)
Level of description
Extent and medium
10 boxes (1.5 metres)
Context area
Name of creator
Biographical history
Vasilii Nikolaevich Azhaev (1915-1968) was born in the village of Sotskoye, Moscow province, in 1915. Arrested in 1934 for ‘counter-revolutionary activities,’ Azhaev was sentenced to four years as a prisoner in the Corrective Labour Camp of the Baikal-Amur Main Line of the People’s Commissariat of Internal affairs (BAMLAG NKVD) in Svobodnyi, in the Far East. Following his early release in March 1937, Azhaev remained in the camp as a ‘free labourer.’ He also contributed to and worked as a chief editor of various camp publications. These did not circulate beyond the camp’s limits. There he completed his novel Daleko ot Moskvy [Far from Moscow], which won the Stalin Prize for literature in 1949. The novel depicted construction of a pipeline in the Far East. He died in 1968 in Moscow.
Archival history
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
Gift of Professor Thomas Lahusen, Department of History, University of Toronto, 2016.
Content and structure area
Scope and content
Thomas Lahusen collection of Vasilii Azhaev’s materials includes mostly photocopies of drafts of manuscripts, articles, readers’ conferences reports, notebooks, photographs, personal correspondence as well as official documentation pertaining to Azhaev’s imprisonment and further employment in the Corrective Labor Camp of the Baikal-Amur Main Line. The collection includes photocopies of periodicals produced and disseminated within Soviet labour camps. For the most part, the collection combines material from Azhaev’s personal archives with some documents from the State Archives of the Region of Khabarovsk. Thomas Lahusen collected and used these documents when writing his manuscript, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Most of the material are copies from Azhaev’s personal archive that were given to Thomas Lahusen by Irina Liubimova-Azhaeva in 1992.
Appraisal, destruction and scheduling
Accruals
System of arrangement
Conditions of access and use area
Conditions governing access
Material may be requested in person at the Fisher Library Reference Desk, or in advance using our online stack retrieval request form: https://aeon.library.utoronto.ca
Conditions governing reproduction
Language of material
- Russian