Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Russian & Former Soviet Union

Although the Russian novelist and playwright Leonid Leonov had published extensively before 1917 he considered that his literary career began only in 1922 with the short story Buryga. His talent developed rapidly in the comparatively free cultural climate of the first decade of the Revolution and by 1927 his characteristic style and themes were already formed. It was in this year, however, that the Communist Party began to impose its demands on the artists and intellectuals.

Leonov's beliefs and values were incompatible with the Soviet version of Marxism but he tried to affirm them...

Writers have a difficult time making a living in contemporary Russia. Market-driven publishing companies have pushed serious domestic prose to the fringes of their output and few people have money to buy books. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 led Russian society to become polarized between an increasingly prosperous minority and a very poor majority. This divide is also mirrored within the writing community, with some writers supporting conservative, nationalist pro-Soviet thinking, and others, liberal, democratic, pro-Western thought.

N.N. Shneidman, in the tradition...

Writers have a difficult time making a living in contemporary Russia. Market-driven publishing companies have pushed serious domestic prose to the fringes of their output and few people have money to buy books. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 led Russian society to become polarized between an increasingly prosperous minority and a very poor majority. This divide is also mirrored within the writing community, with some writers supporting conservative, nationalist pro-Soviet thinking, and others, liberal, democratic, pro-Western thought.

N.N. Shneidman, in the tradition...

It is often assumed that cultural identity is determined in a country's metropolitan centres. Given Russia's long tenure as a geographically and socially diverse empire, however, there is a certain distillation of peripheral experiences and ideas that contributes just as much to theories of national culture as do urban-centred perspectives. Writing at Russia's Border argues that Russian literature needs to be reexamined in light of the fact that many of its most important nineteenth-century texts are peripheral, not in significance but in provenance.

Katya Hokanson makes the case...