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Stalin’s Ghosts

Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature

Muireann Maguire

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English
Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
28 November 2012
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.
By:  
Imprint:   Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Country of Publication:   Switzerland
Edition:   New edition
Volume:   4
Dimensions:   Height: 225mm,  Width: 150mm,  Spine: 18mm
Weight:   480g
ISBN:   9783034307871
ISBN 10:   303430787X
Series:   Russian Transformations: Literature, Culture and Ideas
Pages:   331
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Contents: What is Soviet Gothic? – Gothic Castles – Gothic Bodies – Gothic Death – Gothic Monsters – Gothic Returns.

Muireann Maguire is Career Development Fellow in Russian Literature and Culture at Wadham College, Oxford. Her research interests include Gothic aspects of Soviet literature, Russian émigré prose, and the representation of science and scientists in Russian literary and cinematic culture since 1850. Red Spectres, her translated selection of twentieth-century Russian Gothic tales, was published in 2012.

Reviews for Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature

As a standalone text, this book constitutes a valuable contribution to Soviet studies, introducing us to many lesser-known stories and writers and to new sides of more commonly studied texts. Most important, it reveals the dark underside of Soviet culture in the period from 1920 to 1940, the ghosts and vampires that haunted the dark corners of brightly-lit Socialist Realism. (Eric Laursen, The Russian Review 72, 2013/4)


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