Russian Writing Since 1953: A Critical Survey

by David Allan Lowe

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080442554X
• ISBN13: 9780804425544
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Frederick Ungar
• Length: 208 Pages

Customer Reviews

Great resource for all Russophiles!

I've been a passionate Russophile since the age of thirteen (I eventually minored in Russian and East European Studies), and my two major fields of interest are history and literature. This nice little volume perfectly covers a lot of ground in those two twin subjects. Since it only came out in 1987, though, it's not going to cover the most modern Russian writing available, but it does do a great job at covering all sorts of writing that came out between 1953 and 1987. Prof. Lowe starts off with a chapter on politics and literature, and then covers the areas of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama. In nonfiction, he covers genres such as memoirs, GULAG, culture, samizdat (secretly self-publishing within the Soviet Union) and tamizdat (smuggling one's work to Russian-language presses or translators abroad), and travel memoirs. Fiction covers such genres as historical fiction (including the Tsarist past, the Revolution and Civil War, World War II, collectivisation, the 1920s and the NEP, the Great Terror, and Stalin's final years), fiction about village life, urban prose, and science fiction. Poetry covers a wide range of poets from across the generations, ranging from elders such as Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Zabolotskiy, to poets who survived the Stalinist terror, such as Boris Pasternak and Pavel Antokolskiy, to the newest (at the time) poets, such as Yuriy Kublanovskiy and Aleksey Tsvetkov, to everyone in between. Drama covers, among other topics, elders such as Aleksey Arbuzov and Nikolay Pogodin, major debuts of the Sixties such as Edvard Radzinskiy and Aleksandr Vampilov, scenarists, and absurdists. Along with the well-known (to Westerners) names such as Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, Andrey Voznesenskiy, Boris Pasternak, Iosif Brodskiy, Vasiliy Aksyonov, Osip Mandelshtam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (my own favorite writer), Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Akhmatova, and Mikhail Bulgakov, Prof. Lowe also covers writers and poets who are more well-known in Russia than they are in the West, such as Lidiya Chukovskaya, Bulat Okudzhava (the son of a Georgian father and Armenian mother), Chingiz Aytmatov (who is actually Kirghizian), Valetin Katayev, Fazil Iskander (an Abkhazian, from an area on the eastern shore of the Black Sea), Yuriy Trifonov, and Vladimir Voynovich. Reading this book is sure to give anyone a long reading list of books to look for, although unfortunately a number of them haven't yet been translated into English, if one is unable to read Russian or to even find copies in the first place. I got my copy of this book for a dollar in 1996 and have gotten great mileage out of it ever since. The only minor downside to it is that some of the material is slightly dated (particularly given how there's no more Soviet Union!), and that I've had to write in the death years of a number of the authors listed in the index, such as Bulat Okudzhava, Lidiya Chukovskaya, Lev Kopelev, and Andrey Sinyavskiy. Still, the book is well worth checking out i