Long recognized as the best and most comprehensive work on its subject, Brown’s fine book is now thoroughly revised and updated. It provides a comprehensive treatment of Russian literature, including underground and émigré writings, from 1917 to the early 1980s.

Every stage in the evolution of Russian literature since 1917, every major author, all the important literary organizations, groups, and movements, are sharply outlined, with a wealth of often unfamiliar detail and a notable economy of means. Critical essays on Mayakovsky, Zamyatin, Olesha, Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin, Erofeev, and many others offer sophisticated formal and thematic analyses of a very large array of literary masterpieces.

The book examines and makes intelligible the persistent conflict between the writer and the state, between the literary artist’s urge for untrammeled self-expression and the pervasive control of intellectual activity exercised by the Soviet government. Chapters on “The Levers of Control under Stalin,” “The First Two Thaws,” “Into the Underground,” and “Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps” reveal the conditions under which Russian literature was produced in various periods and investigate the forces that drove an important segment of the literature into clandestine publication or into exile. “Exiles, Early and Late” deals with some of the leading figures in émigré literature and examines the condition of exile as an influence on literary creation. “The Surface Channel” describes and analyzes a number of significant works published aboveground in the Soviet Union during the sixties and seventies. Brown abandons the old distinction between Soviet and émigré literature, treating all Russian writing as part of a single stream, divided since 1917 into two currents not totally separate but subtly interrelated.

• Contents 
• Introduction: Literature and the Political Problem
• 1 
• Since 1917: A Brief History
• Soviet Literature
• Persistence of the Past
• Fellow Travelers
• Proletarians
• The Stalinists
• Socialist Realism
• The Thaw
• The Sixties and Seventies
• 2 
• Mayakovsky and the Left Front of Art
• The Suicide Note
• Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy
• The Cloud
• “The Backbone Flute”
• The Commune and the Left Front
• The Bedbug and The Bath
• Mayakovsky as a Monument
• Poets of Different Camps
• 3 
• Prophets of a Brave New World
• The Machine and England
• Olesha's Critique of the Reason
• Envy and Rage
• 4 
• The Intellectuals, I
• Serapions
• Boris Pilnyak: Biology and History
• 5 
• The Intellectuals, II
• Isaac Babel: Horror in a Minor Key
• Konstantin Fedin: The Confrontation with Europe
• Leonov and Katayev
• Conclusion
• 6 
• The Proletarians, I
• The Proletcult
• The Blacksmith Poets
• Yury Libedinsky: Communists as Human Beings
• Tarasov-Rodionov: “Our Own Wives, Our Own Children”
• Dmitry Furmanov: An Earnest Commissar
• A. S. Serafimovich: A Popular Saga
• 7 
• The Proletarians, II
• Fyodor Gladkov: A Literary Autodidact
• Alexander Fadeyev: The Search for a New Leo Tolstoy
• Mikhail Sholokhov: The Don Cossacks
• A Scatter of Minor Deities
• Conclusion
• 8 
• The Critic Voronsky and the Pereval Group
• Criticism and the Study of Literature
• Voronsky
• Pereval
• 9 
• The Levers of Control under Stalin
• Resistance
• The Purge
• The Literary State
• 10 
• Zoshchenko and the Art of Satire
• 11 
• After Stalin: The First Two Thaws
• Pomerantsev, Panova, and The Guests
• Ilya Ehrenburg and Alexey Tolstoy
• The Second Thaw
• The Way of Pasternak
• 12 
• Into the Underground
• The Literary Parties
• The Trouble with Gosizdat: End of a Thaw
• Buried Treasure: Platonov and Bulgakov
• The Exodus into Samizdat and Tamizdat: Sinyavsky
• 13 
• Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps
• One Day
• The First Circle and The Cancer Ward
• The Gulag
• The Calf and the Oak: Dichtung and Wahrheit
• Other Contributions to the Epic
• 14 
• The Surface Channel, I: The Village
• 15 
• The Surface Channel, II: Variety of Theme and Style
• The City: Intelligentsia, Women, Workers
• The Backwoods: Ethical Problems
• Other New Voices of the Sixties and Seventies
• World War II
• Published Poets
• A Final Word on Socialist Realism
• 16 
• Exiles, Early and Late
• The Exile Experience
• “Young Prose” and What Became of It
• Religious Quest: Maximov and Ternovsky
• Truth through Obscenity: Yuz Aleshkovsky
• Transcendence and Tragedy: Erofeev's Trip
• Poetry of the Daft: Sasha Sokolov
• Perversion of Logic as Ideology: Alexander Zinoviev
• A Gathering of Writers
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index