Read more
Across the twentieth century, the Russian literary hero remained central to Russian fiction and frequently "battled" one enemy or another, whether on the battlefield or on a civilian front. War was the experience of the Russian people, and it became a dominant trope to represent the Soviet experience in literature as well as other areas of cultural life. This book traces those war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in the literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Emmanuil Kazakevich, Vera Panova, Viktor Nekrasov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Voinovich, Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Makanin, Viktor Astafiev, Viktor Pelevin, and Vasily Aksyonov. These authors represented official Soviet literature and underground or dissident literature; they fell into and out of favor, were exiled and returned to Russia, died at home and abroad. Most importantly, they were all touched by war, and they reacted to the state of war in their literary works.
About the author
Angela Brintlinger is Professor of Slavic Languages and Cultures and Director of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at Ohio State University, USA. Her scholarly titles include books on biography (Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture, 1917- 1937, 2000) and war (Chapaev and his Comrades: War and the Russian Literary Hero in the Twentieth Century, 2012), as well as edited volumes about mental illness (Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, 2007), Chekhov (Chekhov for the Twenty-First Century, 2012), food and gender (Seasoned Socialism: Food and Gender in Late Soviet Everyday Life, 2019), and translations (Derzhavin by Vladislav Khodasevich and Russian Cuisine in Exileby Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis). She has also published numerous articles and essays in English and Russian. Brintlinger is also the author of The Manic Bookstore Café, a blog dedicated to linking the present-both the extraordinary and the quotidian-with some of her favorite writers and artworks.
Summary
Across the twentieth century, war was the experience of the Russian people, and it became a dominant trope to represent the Soviet experience in literature as well as other areas of cultural life. This book traces those war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in the literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period.
Additional text
“Brintlinger presents a critical “defamiliarization” to stimulate another generation of readers and scholars to reexamine the tragic history of twentieth-century Russia and read its Salient writers from a new perspective. . . . Brintlinger’s introduction not only introduces the diverse set of writers, issues, and thematic priorities of her main text. It also establishes her own voice as thoughtful, resourceful, scholarly, and well informed about the vast legacy of Russian war literature. . . . Bringing to the task a broad scholarly, philosophical vision and sharp, discrete critical tools, Brintlinger has produced a formidable work. It should serve as an indispensible guide to the literature of the Russian ‘short twentieth century’ (1917—1991).”
