The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature

by Marina Balina (Editor), Evgeny Dobrenko

In Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations – changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both émigré literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources – from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and émigré literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova.

Genres: Russian Literature, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

326 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

Reviews

[M]

I can only say one thing - thank you, you helped me to not go insane when I was preparing for my Russian MA Exam.