Russian Literature since 1991

An international team of leading experts provide the first comprehensive account of post-Soviet Russian literature.

Russian Literature since 1991 is the first comprehensive, single-volume compendium of modern scholarship on post-Soviet Russian literature. The volume encompasses broad, complex and diverse sources of literary material - from ideological and historical novels to experimental prose and poetry, from nonfiction to drama. Written by an international team of leading experts on contemporary Russian literature and culture, it presents a broad panorama of genres in post-Soviet literature such as postmodernism, magical historicism, hyper-naturalism (in drama), and the new lyricism. At the same time, it offers close readings of the most prominent works published in Russia since the end of the Soviet regime and elimination of censorship. The collection highlights the interdisciplinary context of twenty-first-century Russian literature and can be widely used both for research and teaching by specialists in and beyond Russian studies, including those in post-Cold War and post-communist world history, literary theory, comparative literature and cultural studies.

1. The burden of freedom: Russian literature after Communism Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky; 2. Recycling of the Soviet Evgeny Dobrenko; 3. (Post)ideological novel Serguei Alex. Oushakine; 4. Historical novel Kevin M. F. Platt; 5. Dystopias and catastrophe tales after Chernobyl Eliot Borenstein; 6. Magical historicism Alexander Etkind; 7. Petropoetics Ilya Kalinin; 8. Postmodernist novel Mark Lipovetsky; 9. Narrating trauma Helena Goscilo; 10. (Auto)biographical prose Marina Balina; 11. The legacy of the Underground Poets Catherine Ciepiela; 12. New lyrics Stephanie Sandler; 13. Narrative poetry Ilya Kukulin; 14. New drama Boris Wolfson; Works cited.

Evgeny Dobrenko is Professor and Head of Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield. His most recent publications include A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (co-edited with Galin Tihanov, 2011), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (co-edited with Marina Balina, Cambridge, 2011) and Noncanonical Classic: Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (co-edited with Ilya Kukulin, Mark Lipovetsky and Maria Mayofis, 2010).
Mark Lipovetsky is Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Charms of Cynical Reason: The Transformations of the Trickster Trope in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (2011), Paralogies: Transformation of (Post)modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s–2000s (2008) and Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999).