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Offers an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy world of early Soviet "production" prose, with its celebration of robust workers heroically building socialism. The novel combines burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical and Russian High Modernist literature with a tongue-in-cheek plot.
List of contents
Introduction: A Soviet Pastoral
A Note on Names
PART I
Chapter One
Chapter Three
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART II
Chapter Seven
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Eighteen
PART III
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Forty
Notes
Egunov Bibliography
About the author
Ainsley Morse is a teacher, translator, and scholar of Slavic languages and literatures, primarily Russian. She currently teaches at Pomona College.
Summary
Andrei Egunov-Nikolev’s Beyond Tula is an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy world of early Soviet “production” prose, with its celebration of robust workers heroically building socialism. Combining burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical and Russian High Modernist literature with a rather tongue-in-cheek plot about the struggles of an industrializing rural proletariat, this “Soviet pastoral” actually appeared in the official press in 1931 (though it was quickly removed from circulation). As a renegade classics scholar, Egunov was aware of the expressive potential latent in so-called “light genres”—Beyond Tula is a modernist pastoral jaunt that leaves the reader with plenty to ponder.
