Customer Reviews

Russian Literature Since the Revolution: Revised and Enlarged Edition

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This book slides in and out of print but can usually be found in used stores or online. It begins with Mayakovsky and ends with Alexander Zinoviev and covers the best writers, official or dissident, over a period of 65 years in the Soviet Union.

Political context is the rope that ties all of these writers together from Isaac Babel's murder to Mikhail Bulgakov's silence to Andrei Sinyavsky's exile to young Eduard Limonov's poverty in America. What emerges is a picture of many of the riskiest and most experimental authors of the 20th century. For every western modernist like Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf or Pynchon, there was an equal talent in Russia, often going unnoticed. This is the conclusion I've drawn from the text and not the book's thesis.

Writers in this book may be categorized as the officially published like Yuri Trifinov and Leonid Leonov or outcasts like Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Nabokov but all are discussed for their artistic merit and their contribution as writers of and from Russia. It's not a quick narrative read but each chapter gives an introduction to severeal different writers including many who never made a big impact in translation. In short, this book inspires the reader to go out and find other books -- great books. I've owned my copy for a decade and still refer to it when I wish to look for an author that is new to me.

The only, slight fault with this book is that it ends in the 1980s, when it waqs first published, with the Soviet Union still intact. An update of writers who returned to Russia like Solzhenitsyn or Limonov would make a nice finale. So for a good book on that you have to read "The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature" by Deming Brown, not to be confused with this book's author.