Valentin Pikul

Who was Valentin Pikul?

Valentin Savvich Pikul 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, but politically controversial because of his ardent patriotism which was sometimes expressed in thinly veiled Russian nationalism." 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.