Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution—figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov—Epic Revisionism tells the fascinating story of these individuals’ return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era. 

    An inherently interdisciplinary project, Epic Revisionism features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. This volume pairs scholarly essays with selections drawn from Stalin-era primary sources—newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories—to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history.

“These scholars shed a great deal of light not only on Stalinist culture but on the politics of cultural production under the Soviet system.”—David L. Hoffmann, Slavic Review

Baron brings together eleven articles published between 1958 and 1986 with a new introduction and an autobiographical essay that serves as a coda to the collection. The essays examine Georgi V. Plekhanov's ideas about history and their relationship to Soviet historiography, most especially his concept of poet-primitive Russia not as a Western feudal society but rather an Oriental despotism, and his views on the prospect for socialism in the United States. Baron also includes two pieces that revise his earlier thinking about Plekhanov, retracing his steps and exploring paths he neglected in his earlier research for his major biography, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism (1963).