"In its sure grasp of a huge subject and in its speculative boldness, Professor Clark's study represents a major breakthrough. It sends one back to the original texts with a whole host of new questions.... And it also helps us to understand the place of the 'official' writer in that peculiar mixture of ideology, collective pressure, and inspiration which is the Soviet literary process." Times Literary Supplement

"The Soviet Novel has had an enormous impact on the way Stalinist culture is studied in a range of disciplines (literature scholarship, history, cultural studies, even...

Following the 1917 revolution, thousands of Leo Tolstoy's Russian followers intellectuals and peasants, workers and former soldiers inspired by his ideas about the great moral significance of productive labor, joined together in agricultural communes, believing that they would implement the ideals proclaimed by the Russian revolution: the building of a humane, stateless society, free of violence and exploitation. The goals of the Tolstoyans soon came into conflict with the policies of the Soviet state. With the forced collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s, most of the Tolstoyan...

..". highly recommended.... This anthology of faithful translations of the classics is by far the best of its kind to come out for a long time." Canadian Slavic Review

"This is a ground-breaking book on a subject of capital importance, and I think it] should start a debate about modern literature with a rich potential for further development." --Michael Scammell

Return from the Archipelago is the first comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors' memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and...

An exploration of the creative process in four classic works: Death in Venice, Treasure Island, The Rubaiyat of Mar Khayyam, and War and Peace. Creating Literature Out of Life examines four very dissimilar masterpieces and their authors in search of evidence that will answer some of the many questions in the great mystery of creativity. Crossing boundaries of period, nation, and genre, the study looks into the "why" and "how" of the creation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island,...

The most popular Russian prose fiction writer in the 1820s and 1830s, Alexander Bestuzhev (pseudonym Marlinsky) was also a literary critic, poet, military hero, and revolutionary. This study attempts to reestablish Bestuzhev's position in Russian cultural history while at the same time introducing a forgotten literary icon to a new audience.

Lewis Bagby places Bestuzhev within the fashionable trends of early European Romanticism and analyzes his Byronic literary persona intricately connected to his military career, the literary polemics of the day, fiction writing, and political...

"A substantial contribution both to Dostoevsky scholarship and to scholarship on the novel. . . . The first book in quite a while to address itself to all of Dostoevsky's opus, certainly a bold move that only someone of Terras's stature could pull off."-Gary Rosenshield, University of Madison-Wisconsin

Admirers have praised Fedor Dostoevsky as the Russian Shakespeare, while his critics have slighted his novels as merely cheap amusements. In this stimulating critical introduction to Dostoevsky's fiction, literary scholar Victor Terras asks readers to draw their own conclusions about...