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Stalin's Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature

Stalin's Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1803742208
ISBN13: 9781803742205
Publisher: Peter Lang Uk
Published: Apr 28 2023
Pages: 332
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.72 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Stalin's Ghosts examines the impact of the Gothic-fantastic on Russian literature in the period 1920-1940. It shows how early Soviet-era authors, from well-known names including Fedor Gladkov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov and Evgenii Zamiatin, to niche figures such as Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and Aleksandr Beliaev, exploited traditional archetypes of this genre: the haunted castle, the deformed body, vampires, villains, madness and unnatural death. Complementing recent studies of Soviet culture by Eric Naiman and Lilya Kaganovsky, this book argues that Gothic-fantastic tropes functioned variously as a response to the traumas produced by revolution and civil war, as a vehicle for propaganda, and as a subtle mode of unwriting the cultural monolith of Socialist Realism.

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Literary Criticism