Literary Critisism during the Revolution and the Civil War (1917-1921).

This book is the first comprehensive history – in the West and in Russia alike – of literary criticism in the Soviet age. Although this history is the work of several distinguished scholars, it is not a volume collecting heterogeneous articles, but rather a collective monograph based on a well thought-through plan. Our part, written in collaboration with S. Garzonio, (The first two sections are by Garzonio; sections 3-7 are by Zalambani, as written in the notes) opens the book and concerns the following points: • War Communism – Civil War – Intelligentsia and the Revolution • Criticism and Periodicals of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Criticism and Periodicals of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries. “The Scythians” Group. The Acmeists. The Imagists • The Futurists (“The Art of the Commune”) • A “Silver Age” or “Literary Collapse”? Plekhanov, Lenin, Vorovsky, Ol’minsky, Trotzky and the Marxist tradition • Proletcult. “Positive Aesthetics” (Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gor’ky); • The institutions of criticism in the Civil War. Their place in the genesis of the institutions of censorship and the rise of Soviet literary periodicals • Attitudes to the classic and to the current literary process