Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich Russian novelist, playwright, and satirist, one of the most brilliant and cultured minds of the post-revolutionary period, and creator of a peculiarly modern genre—the anti-Utopian novel. His ...
skaz in Russian literature, a written narrative that imitates a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of that persona. Among the well-known writers who have used ...
Assessment from the Dostoyevsky, Fyodor article Dostoyevsky's name has become synonymous with psychological profundity. For generations, the depth and contradictoriness of his heroes have made systematic psychological theories look shallow by ...
Soviet science fiction from the science fiction article Only the gargantuan world of Soviet state publishing could match the production of U.S. science fiction. The Soviet promotion of “scientific socialism” created a vital breathing space for science ...
Serapion Brothers group of young Russian writers formed in 1921 under the unsettled conditions of the early Soviet regime. Though they had no specific program, they were united in their belief that a work of art must ...
Experiments in the 1920s from the Russian literature article Within Russia the 1920s saw a wide diversity of literary trends and works, including those by mere “fellow travelers” (Leon Trotsky's phrase) of the Revolution. Isaak Babel wrote a brilliant cycle of ...
Literature from the satire article When the satiric utterance breaks loose from its background in ritual and magic, as in ancient Greece (when it is free, that is, to develop in response to literary stimuli rather than the “practical” ...
utopia an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions. Hence “utopian” and “utopianism” are words used to denote visionary reform that tends to be impossibly idealistic.
The NEP and the defeat of the Left from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics article The last phase of Lenin's life—first partial, then total disablement, then death—had fortuitously provided a sort of transitional period for a party leadership to emerge and for policies to be argued.
