Research Catalog

Title

Soviet literary culture in the 1970s : the politics of irony / Anatoly Vishevsky ; with an anthology of ironic prose translated by Michael Biggins and Anatoly Vishevsky.

Author

Vishevskiĭ, Anatoliĭ.

Publication

Gainesville : University Press of Florida, ©1993.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 326 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

• Hope and faith were in short supply among Soviet liberals by the late 1960s. Writing about the popular culture of the Soviet intellectual during the years of post-Stalinist thaw, Anatoly Vishevsky cites the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as a formal landmark that inaugurated the period in which irony was propelled to the forefront of the literary and cultural scene. Irony was the direct product of disillusion and despair over the apparent abandonment of the promising.
• Post-thaw ideals and values. This period that ended with the beginning of perestroika and glasnost, Vishevsky believes, also was the incubator of many processes now prevalent in the country's literature and culture. Although censorship kept this ironic worldview off the main stage of Soviet literature, it surfaced in peripheral forms - stand-up comedy, songs of the "bards," short stories in periodicals and newspapers, radio and TV shows, local cinematography, regional.
• Literature - works that friends discussed over kitchen tables, "where most heated debates usually took place in the Soviet Union." A major part of the book is devoted to a corpus of writing never before treated critically: the ironic stories that appeared in the late 1960s and the 1970s in Soviet humor periodicals and in the humor pages of newspapers and magazines. These stories, each three to ten typed pages, were presumably tolerated by the Soviet authorities because.
• Of their brevity and their often unassuming placement in the back pages of magazines. The stories collected here, translated for the first time in English and including several by Aksyonov and Bitov, constitute a new subgenre in the history of Russian literature - the ironic short story.

Subjects

• Popular culture > Soviet Union
• Short stories, Russian > Translations into English
• Irony in literature
• Russian fiction > 20th century > History and criticism
• Short stories, Russian > History and criticism

Genre/Form

• novels.
• Novels
• Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• Fiction
• Translations
• Fiction.
• Novels.
• Romans.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-129) and index.

Contents

Preface -- Pt. 1 Irony as the Leading Mode in Soviet Literature and Culture of the 1970s -- 1 Irony in Siberian Literature (starting p. 17) -- 2 Irony in Soviet Culture (starting p. 34) -- 3 Ironic Prose as a Subgenre of the Humorous Short Story (starting p. 71) -- Pt. 2 Anthology of Ironic Prose -- The Sun Was Shining... (starting p. 133) / E. Abramov -- A Cabdriver's Dream (starting p. 135) / V. Aksyonov -- A Vulnerable Ego (starting p. 137) / V. Aksyonov -- A Tube of Ultramarine (starting p. 141) / S. Altov -- Nightingales in September (starting p. 145) / A. Arkanov -- Peaches (starting p. 151) / A. Arkanov -- Cross Country (starting p. 157) / A. Arkanov -- Before You Go (starting p. 159) / A. Arkanov -- Man (starting p. 163) / V. Bakhchanian -- The Sleep Walker (starting p. 164) / V. Bakhnov -- Someone Else's Dog (starting p. 169) / A. Bitov -- Made in Heaven (starting p. 171) / B. Briker, A. Vishevsky -- A Lamppost and the Tower (starting p. 174) / H. Drobiz -- In the Woods (starting p. 179) / N. Elin, V. Kashaev -- The Double (starting p. 182) / A. Gladilin -- A Malady (starting p. 185) / V. Gonik -- Cut! Let's Call It a Day (starting p. 189) / G. Gorin -- Kurentsov Unclad (starting p. 195) / G. Gorin -- Stop Potapov! (starting p. 200) / G. Gorin -- The Dream (starting p. 210) / G. Gorin -- On the Same Day Every Month (starting p. 214) / A. Inin, L. Osadchuk -- Sugar, Sugar (starting p. 218) / D. Ivanov, V. Trifonov -- My Second Self (starting p. 222) / D. Ivanov, V. Trifonov -- Hack Writer (starting p. 226) / L. Kaminsky -- The Bald Angel (starting p. 229) / F. Kamov -- Victory (starting p. 232) / N. Katerli -- The Truth (starting p. 235) / H. Kemoklidze -- When I Look in the Mirror (starting p. 237) / A. Khait -- My Strength of Character (starting p. 241) / R. Kireev -- In the Nick of Time (starting p. 243) / V. Klimovich -- Nastenka the Tree (starting p. 245) / N. Konyaev -- Something about Astronomy (starting p. 248) / V. Korotich -- If Such a Thing Should Happen... (starting p. 250) / F. Krivin -- What Happened to Sergeev (starting p. 256) / A. Kuchaev -- Nothing Special (starting p. 260) / A. Kuchaev -- Happiness (starting p. 261) / A. Kuchaev -- Cheating (starting p. 264) / A. Kurlyandsky -- The Sixth Sense (starting p. 268) / A. Kurlyandsky, A. Khait -- What Didn't Happen to Nenasbev (starting p. 273) / M. Mishin -- One Fifty Four (starting p. 275) / L. Novozhenov -- Purple-Colored Camel (starting p. 278) / G. Pruslin -- My Circle of Friends (starting p. 281) / N. Shakhbazov -- The Wheel of Fortune (starting p. 284) / E. Shatko -- Soyev's Masterpiece (starting p. 288) / V. Slavkin -- One, Two, Three... (starting p. 292) / V. Tokareva -- A Ruble Sixty Isn't Much (starting p. 296) / V. Tokareva -- Still Young (starting p. 308) / M. Zadornov -- One Life to Live...or a Tavern Story (starting p. 310) / M. Zakharov -- Fantastic Miniatures (starting p. 312) / A. Zhitinsky -- Index (starting p. 321)

ISBN

• 0813012252
• 9780813012254
• 0813012260
• 9780813012261

LCCN

93012529

OCLC

• ocm27726144
• 27726144
• SCSB-1997881

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library