"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 anthropology and political science)." --Slavic Review "Those readers who have come to realize that history is a branch of mythology will find Clark's book a stimulating and rewarding account of Soviet mythopoesis." --American Historical Review A dynamic account of the socialist realist novel's evolution as seen in the context of Soviet culture. A new Afterword brings the history of Socialist Realism to its end at the close of the 20th century.

"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 anthropology and political science)." --Slavic Review "Those readers who have come to realize that history is a branch of mythology will find Clark's book a stimulating and rewarding account of Soviet mythopoesis." --American Historical Review A dynamic account of the socialist realist novel's evolution as seen in the context of Soviet culture. A new Afterword brings the history of Socialist Realism to its end at the close of the 20th century.

In this book, first published in 1943, Janko Lavrin provides an overview of the development of the Russian novel by placing the great Russian novelists – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, Gogol – in relation to their native literature and their social, political and cultural backgrounds. An Introduction to the Russian Novel will appeal particularly to students of Russian literature and culture as well as those interested in the development of the novel in general.

Professor Freeborn's book is an attempt to identify and define the evolution of a particular kind of novel in Russian and Soviet literature: the revolutionary novel. This genre is a uniquely Russian phenomenon and one that is of central importance in Russian literature. The study begins with a consideration of Turgenev's masterpiece Fathers and Children and traces the evolution of the revolutionary novel through to its most important development a century later in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the emergence of a dissident literature in the Soviet Union. Professor Freeborn examines the particular phases of the genre's development, and in particular the development after 1917: the early fiction which explored the relationship between revolution and instinct, such as Pil'nyak's The Naked Year; the first attempts at mythmaking in Leonov's The Badgers and Furmanov's Chapayev; the next phase, in which novelists turned to the investigation of ideas, exemplified most notably by Zamyatin's We; the resumption of the classical approach in such works as Olesha's Envy, which explore the interaction between the individual and society. and finally the appearance of the revolutionary epic in Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin, Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don, and Alexey Tolstoy's The Road to Calvary. Professor Freeborn also examines the way this kind of novel has undergone change in response to revolutionary change; and he shows how an important feature of this process has been the implicit assumption that the revolutionary novel is distinguished by its right to pass an objective, independent judgement on revolution and the revolutionary image of man. This is a comprehensive and challenging study of a uniquely Russian tradition of writing, which draws on a great range of novels, many of them little-known in the West. As with other titles in this series all quotations have been translated.

This introduction to the study of the Russian novel demonstrates how the form evolved from imitative beginnings to the point in the 1860s when it reached maturity and established itself as part of the European tradition. Professor Freeborn considers selected novels by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Extended introductory sections to the studies of Dostoyevsk and Tolstoy deal with their earlier works. A final chapter summarises the principal points of contrast between Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, and argues that in certain specific ways, they represent the peaks in the evolution of the form of the Russian novel. Quotations are translated, but key passages are also given in the original. Professor Freeborn treats the novel as a literary form and avoids the overworked formulae on which much historical writing on Russian literature has been based. He is concerned with the literary development of a great form.

Many Russian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made a huge impact, not only inside the boundaries of their own country but across the western world. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of these novels, in fourteen newly-commissioned essays by prominent European and North American scholars. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philosophy; the romantic, realist and modernist traditions; and technique, gender and theory. In this context the work of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, among others, is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading; all quotations are in English. This volume will be invaluable not only for students and scholars but for anyone interested in the Russian novel.

First published in 1986, Soviet Fiction since Stalin presents a comprehensive overview of the literature of the post Stalin period in the Soviet Union. The rapid advances in science and technology in these years are reflected in the themes of many of the major novelists – Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Daniel and Grossman- and scientific subjects frequently offer a vehicle for the exploration of the wider socio-political, moral, and philosophical ideas. As the period advances, however, literature becomes the first medium in which to express mistrust of scientific advance, and hence, indirectly, of Soviet policy as a whole. Rosalind J. Marsh uses a broad definition of ‘science’ which enables her to cover topics ranging from de-Stalinization, nationalism, and anti- Semitism in science, to Lysenko and scientific charlatanism, the Soviet rejection of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, the atom bomb, and also such general problems as secrecy, careerism, and bureaucracy. The bulk of the book concentrates on the Khrushchev years but there is also plentiful discussion of more recent writing such as that of Zinoviev and Voinovich. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Soviet literature, Russian Literature and literature in general.