From Symbolism to Socialist Realism

Developed as a reader for upper division undergraduates and beginning graduates, From Symbolism to Socialist Realism offers broad variety of materials contextualizing the literary texts most frequently read in Russian literature courses at this level. These approaches range from critical-theoretical articles, cultural and historical analyses, literary manifestos and declarations of literary aesthetics, memoirs of revolutionary terrorism and arrests by the NKVD, political denunciations, and “literary vignettes” capturing the spirit of its particular time in a nutshell. The voices of this “polyphonic” reader are diverse: Briusov, Savinkov, Ivanov-Razumnik, Kollontai, Tsvetaeva, Shklovsky, Olesha, Zoshchenko, Zhdanov, Grossman, Evtushenko, and others. The range of specialists on Russian culture represented here is equally broad: Clark, Erlich, Grossman, Nilsson, Peace, Poznansky, Siniavskii, and others. Together they evoke and illuminate a complex and tragic era.

Author Biography

Irene Masing-Delic took her degrees at the Universities of Uppsala and Stockholm. Her career has included appointments at the Australian National University, the University of the Witwatersrand, Friedrich-Alexander University at Erlangen-Nuremberg and University of California at Berkeley. She is currently professor at the Ohio State University in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures. She has published Abolishing Death. A Twentieth-Century Salvation Myth and numerous articles on modernist and early Soviet writers.