Stalin's Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature

By Muireann Maguire

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1803742208
• ISBN13: 9781803742205
• Release Date: April 2023
• Publisher: Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publis
• Length: 332 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"