front cover of Little Jinx
Little Jinx
Abram Tertz
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Little Jinx is a canny mockery of the Soviet world. Its author, Andrei Sinyavsky, a respectable member of the USSR's Institute for World Literature, was exposed in 1965 as the real author of a series of irreverent essays and fantastic tales that had been circulating under the nom de plume Abram Tertz. After five years in a labor camp he immigrated to Paris. Little Jinx is the tale of a man named Sinyavsky, a literary hack and runt who clumsily survives repression and anti-Semitism but also brings misery to those around him. When this "little jinx" inadvertently causes the death of his five brothers, he is consumed by a guilt that seems universal in his society.
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Russian Literature Since the Revolution
Revised and Enlarged Edition
Edward J. Brown
Harvard University Press, 1982

Long recognized as the best and most comprehensive work on its subject, Brown’s fine book is now thoroughly revised and updated. It provides a comprehensive treatment of Russian literature, including underground and émigré writings, from 1917 to the early 1980s.

Every stage in the evolution of Russian literature since 1917, every major author, all the important literary organizations, groups, and movements, are sharply outlined, with a wealth of often unfamiliar detail and a notable economy of means. Critical essays on Mayakovsky, Zamyatin, Olesha, Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin, Erofeev, and many others offer sophisticated formal and thematic analyses of a very large array of literary masterpieces.

The book examines and makes intelligible the persistent conflict between the writer and the state, between the literary artist’s urge for untrammeled self-expression and the pervasive control of intellectual activity exercised by the Soviet government. Chapters on “The Levers of Control under Stalin,” “The First Two Thaws,” “Into the Underground,” and “Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps” reveal the conditions under which Russian literature was produced in various periods and investigate the forces that drove an important segment of the literature into clandestine publication or into exile. “Exiles, Early and Late” deals with some of the leading figures in émigré literature and examines the condition of exile as an influence on literary creation. “The Surface Channel” describes and analyzes a number of significant works published aboveground in the Soviet Union during the sixties and seventies. Brown abandons the old distinction between Soviet and émigré literature, treating all Russian writing as part of a single stream, divided since 1917 into two currents not totally separate but subtly interrelated.

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front cover of Time, Forward!
Time, Forward!
Valentin Kataev
Northwestern University Press, 1995
A classic of Soviet realism, Time, Forward! captures the enthusiasm and optimism of the first Five-Year Plan in its portrayal of the construction of Magnitogorsk, an enormous metallurgical plant considered one of the finest industrial achievements of the period. It embodies the beliefs of the era—that the collective (here a multinational brigade) through its determination and the application of technology can accomplish the impossible, conquer nature, even overcome time. Utilizing cinematic technique to tell his story, Kataev focuses on a twenty-four hour period when of the Magnitogorsk shock-brigades breaks a world record for pouring cement. The result is a remarkably affecting portrait of the idealism and sacrifice powering the early Soviet era.
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