Publisher's Synopsis
This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a compre hensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas-political, intellectual, and institutional-the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse.
The essays follow early movements such as Formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, Futurism, Structuralism, the Fellow Travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the Cultural Revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology.The chapters follow theory and crit icism into the 1930s with examinations of the Writer's Union, semantic paleontology, and Socialist Realism under Stalin. A more "humanized" literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the Party line, Soviet heroism, and even antiSemitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the "long" 1970s, followed by neoFormalism and post modernism in the 1980s and 1990s, and the beginning of glasnost.
For the first time anywhere, this volume analyses all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history.
