Soviet Heroic Poetry in Context discusses key issues surrounding the composition and recording of folklore as well as its often intensely political aspect and its preoccupation with chimerical cultural authority. These issues are dramatically displayed in Soviet epic compositions of the 1930s and 1940s, the so-called noviny (-new songs-), which took their formal inspiration largely from traditional Russian epic songs, byliny (-songs of the past-), and their narrative content from contemporary, political, and other events in Stalinist Russia. The story of the noviny is at once complex and...