Böcker av Angela Brintlinger

Writing a Usable Past argues that in the twenty years following the Bolshevik Revolution, writers seeking to understand the role of man in human history looked to literary heroes from past eras. Each in his own way, authors Iurii Tynianov, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Mikhail Bulgakov turned to the genre of biography--novels, literary biographies, plays--in search of a hero for their own time. As biographers, they each then felt the pull of the centenary commemoration of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and entered into the competition to claim Pushkin as a symbol of Russian culture. The split in Russian culture between those who remained in Soviet Russia and those who became part of the far-flung diaspora creates a fascinating way to explore the role of biography for this contested era.

Across the twentieth century, the Russian literary hero remained central to Russian fiction and frequently "e;battled"e; one enemy or another, whether on the battlefield or on a civilian front. War was the experience of the Russian people, and it became a dominant trope to represent the Soviet experience in literature as well as other areas of cultural life. This book traces those war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in the literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Emmanuil Kazakevich, Vera Panova, Viktor Nekrasov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Voinovich, Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Makanin, Viktor Astafiev, Viktor Pelevin, and Vasily Aksyonov. These authors represented official Soviet literature and underground or dissident literature; they fell into and out of favor, were exiled and returned to Russia, died at home and abroad. Most importantly, they were all touched by war, and they reacted to the state of war in their literary works.