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Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth and the Twenty-First Centuries
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Adventure Narratives in the Early Soviet Union

Adventure Narratives in the Early Soviet Union

Series: Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth and the Twenty-First Centuries

Edited by Riccardo Nicolosi and Brigitte Obermayr

Published by: Academic Studies Press

Imprint: Academic Studies Press

Language: English

266 Pages

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9798887196312

Published: December 2024

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Description
Contents
Contributors
Praise

In the early 1920s, Soviet writers and literary theorists were convinced that adventure fiction held the key to developing a new kind of narrative. The call for a "Russian Stevenson" (Lev Lunts) profoundly impacted the theory of prose and different notions of the literary hero. It also led theorists like Shklovsky to write dime novels and convinced writers of various backgrounds to explore Soviet topography in a new light, harnessing the synergies between imperialism and adventure. Despite the inherently anarchist nature of adventure and its bourgeois offspring, the magic of adventure found its way into socialist realism under different guises, demanding recognition and resisting neglect, especially in the case of socialist realist film.

This book offers a critical historical reconstruction of the early Soviet adventure craze and its lasting popularity in socialist realism. It also offers innovative theoretical propositions for a philological analysis of adventure fiction that arise from this unique historical context.

Acknowledgements

Introductory Remarks

Riccardo Nicolosi and Brigitte Obermayr

A. Theory and History of Adventure Narratives in the Early Soviet Union (1920s–1930s)

1. New Adventures for the Soviet Present. Conceptualizations and Debates Surrounding a Contested Popular Literary Genre

Matthias Schwartz

2. “We Are Incapable of Creating the Simplest Criminal Plot . . .”: The Formalist Theory of Prose and Russian Experimental Adventure Literature of the 1920s

Aage A. Hansen-Löve

3. Poetics of Adventure in the 1920s (from Shklovsky to Bakhtin)

Riccardo Nicolosi

4. The Magic of Cinema: Vladimir Vainshtok and a Socialist Film Poetics of Adventure

Matthias Schwartz

B. Case studies

5. Munchhausen’s Adventures in Early Soviet Fiction

Mark Lipovetsky

6. Ostap Bender: From an Adventurer to a Bureaucrat. Transformations of the Early Soviet Rogue Narrative in The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Little Golden Calf (1931)

Riccardo Nicolosi

7. Meta-Adventures: Vsevolod Ivanov’s and Viktor Shklovsky’s Novel Iprit in the Context of the Early Soviet Boom of Adventure Literature

Brigitte Obermayr

8. Leaping over Death: Adventurous Agency in Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925)

Christiane Schäfer

9. Andrei Platonov’s Novel Chevengur as a Journey of Adventure

Hans Günther

10. Revolutionary Adventures in China: Internationalism and Early Soviet Adventure Fiction

Edward Tyerman

11. Zinaida Rikhter’s Flight Adventure: An ‘Adventure Travel Sketch’

Tatjana Hofmann

Riccardo Nicolosi is full Professor of Slavic Literatures at LMU Munich. His research focuses on the literatures and cultures of Russia and the Soviet Union and South Eastern Europe from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. His latest publications, which explore the rhetorical and narrative interfaces between literature and science, include: Degeneration. Literature and Psychiatry in Late 19th Century Russian Culture (in Russian, 2019); and Born to Be Criminal. The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union, edited with Anne Hartmann (2017).

Brigitte Obermayr is full Professor of East Slavic Literatures and Cultures at Potsdam University. Her research focuses on the literatures and cultures of Russia and the Soviet Union from twentieth to twenty-first centuries: avantgarde, theory of literature and culture, unofficial late Soviet literature and culture, and the political in literary discourse. She is editor of Dmitrii Prigov’s lyric oeuvre (facsimile edition, forthcoming), and her recent publications include the monograph Datumskunst. Datierte Zeit zwischen Gegebenem und Möglichkeit (2022) and the anthology Phänomenologische und empirische Kunstwissenschaften in der frühen Sowjetunion, co-edited with Aage A. Hansen-Löve.

“Riccardo Nicolosi and Brigitte Obermayr’s edited volume offers a kaleidoscopic view of a kaleidoscopic era in Soviet culture. No one who has looked closely at early Soviet writing and art would consider the editors’ focus on ‘adventure narratives’ to be excessively narrow. Indeed, adventure was the watchword for the first decade of Soviet rule—a rallying cry for the builders of a new culture. Regardless of how the Soviet adventure ended, it gave rise to some of the most innovative and entertaining texts and films of the first half of the 20th century, and the contributors to this volume explore these works with critical acumen and evident relish.”
— Boris Dralyuk, translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, and other authors