San Antonio College Library

In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and Orwell's Animal Farm, they have tested notions of truth, reality, and representation. They have gone beyond their precursors by experimenting with the tensions between...

"The articles in the Critical Companion offer analyses of Russian short stories that encompass the major aesthetic and thematic concern of the short story genre in the twentieth century. Each article focuses on a single story by authors ranging from Chekhov and Bunin to Nabokov and Shalamov, to Tolstaya and Pelevin; together they outline the developments in each author's oeuvre and in the subjects, structure, and themes of the twentieth-century Russian...

This volume offers a thematic account of Russian novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philosophy, technique, gender and theory.

"Unvarnishing Reality draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations--including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky,...