Literary Criticism / Russian & Former Soviet Union

This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.

Winner of the 2012 Efim Etkind Prize for the best book on Russian culture, awarded by the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia.

Other Animals examines the interaction of animals and humans in Russian literature, art, and life from the eighteenth century until the present. The chapters explore the unique nature of the Russian experience in a range of human-animal relationships through tales of cruelty, interspecies communion and compassion, and efforts to either overcome or establish the human-animal divide.

This book exposes the paradox behind the myth of the indestructible Stalinist-era male. In her analysis of social-realist literature and cinema, Kaganovsky examines the recurring theme of the mutilated male body. She views this representation as a thinly veiled statement about the emasculated male condition during the Stalinist era. Kaganovsky provides an insightful reevaluation of classic works of the period, including the novels of Nikolai Ostrovskii (How Steel Was Tempered) and Boris Polevoi (A Story About a Real Man), and films such as Ivan Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, Eduard Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, and Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin, among others. The symbolism of wounding in these works acts as a fissure in the facade of Stalinist cultural production through which we can view the consequences of historic and political trauma.

Holmgren examines how capitalism in turn-of-the-century Russia and the Kingdom of Poland affected the elitist culture of literature, publishing, book markets, and readership.

Mozur traces the development of Chingiz Aitmatov’s fiction from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s, and discusses his work against the Soviet political and cultural background in which it was created.