Tvardovsky’s evolution as writer and editor reflected the paradoxes of his epoch, and was crystalised in his relationship to ‘two fathers,’ his biological father and Stalin. In his youth in the 1930s he renounced the former because he idealised the latter’s ideology and programme. The renunciation caused him personal trauma, which was intensified by the experience of the arrest and condemnation of several of his close literary colleagues in the late 1930s. Those experiences raised in him questions he could not answer at the time. After 1953, however, as Stalin’s past crimes were gradually publicly revealed, Tvardovsky reassessed his admiration of him. He remained faithful to socialism as an ideal, but now aimed to clear the way for its future optimum development by using memory to rediscover and understand the Soviet Union’s true history. This process required him also to reassess the memory of his father, and to take full responsibility for having renounced him. He completed this evolution only with the composition of his last major work, By the Right of Memory [Po pravu pamyati].