The Cambridge companion to twentieth-century Russian literature

Abstract

Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina, eds. The Cambridge Companion to TwentiethCentury Russian Literature. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xxiv, 328 pp. Index. $29.99, paper.The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature is a welcome new addition to Cambridge Companions to Literature series. For Evgeny Dobrenko (University of Sheffield) and Marina Balina (Illinois Wesley an University) this is yet another result of a fruitful long-term scholarly collaboration - they earlier co-edited Endquote: Sots-art Literature and Soviet Grand Style (2000) and Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (2009). As editors rightly assert in their introductory article, the twentieth centuiy [in Russian histoiy] was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures (p. xxii). Any serious attempt to justly reflect even a fraction of what has happened in Russian literary process during that turbulent centuiy in a single- volume compendium would present, beyond doubt, challenges to any compiler. The experience and knowledge of many fine contributors to collection under review, however, seem to have made this near impossible task an obvious success.The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature opens with a useful chronology, covering years 1893-2006. Since numerous attempts to succinctly present major hallmarks in evolution of Russian and Soviet literatures have been made in past, any observer will naturally pay more attention to latest additions in this chronological table. With this in mind, current reviewer found coverage of postSoviet literary histoiy extremely well-balanced and, at same time, nuanced enough: from year of establishment of leading journal New Literary Review ( 1 992) and publication of Vladimir Sorokin' s Roman (1994) authors' awareness extends to foundation of National Bestseller prize (2000) and attacks of pro-Putin youth group Moving Together against writers Sorokin and Pelevin two years later. In short, chronology offers a broad contextual picture of final decade of twentieth-century Russian literature and socio-political events around it.Fifteen chapters in this collection cover such diverse topics as poetry, prose, theatre, film, and literary policies and institutions in Russia and former Soviet Union. …