Description: Stalin's Ghosts examines the impact of the Gothic-fantastic on Russian literature in the period 1920-1940. The volume shows how Soviet authors drew on the traditional archetypes of the genre, such as the castle, the body, vampires, ghosts, villains, madness, and unnatural death, presenting a revisionist challenge to the view of Soviet literature as strictly rational.
Review Quotes: As a standalone text, this book constitutes a valuable contribution to Soviet studies, introducing us to many lesser-known stories and writers and to new sides of more commonly studied texts. Most important, it reveals the dark underside of Soviet culture in the period from 1920 to 1940, the ghosts and vampires that haunted the dark corners of brightly-lit Socialist Realism.
(Eric Laursen, The Russian Review Vol.72, No.4/2013)
(Roger Cockrell, Modern Language Review Vol.109/2014) The variety of authors and works discussed is impressive.
(Barry P. Scherr, Slavic and East European Journal Vol.57, No.4/2013) Stalin's Ghosts has succeeded in revealing the pervasive presence of the gothic in early Soviet literature.
(Elizabeth A. Papazian, Slavonica Vol.20, No.1/2014) For Muireann Maguire [...] questions of genre ultimately transcend genre itself. As the title of her new study suggests, she finds her answers in the Gothic tradition, which she argues was alive and well in the Soviet Union (contrary to any reasonable assumption). In so doing, she provides a framework for rethinking Soviet culture in decidedly un-Soviet categories.
(Eliot Borenstein, TLS August 2013)