In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction

Front Cover
Duke University Press, 1990 - Literary Criticism - 288 pages
This new edition of In Stalin's Time, which brings back into print Vera Dunham's 1976 landmark study of popular fiction in the Soviet Union during the Stalin regime, is updated to include new material by the author and a new introduction by Richard Sheldon. Dunham describes how the middle-brow or postwar establishmentarian literature of the Stalinist period was a product of a "Big Deal" intended to propagate values and establish an alliance between the regime and the middle class. Both descriptive and analytical, Dunham's complex picture of "high totalitarianism" not only reveals insights into the details of Soviet life but illuminates important theoretical questions about the role of literature in the political structure of Soviet society.
 

Contents

The Big Deal
3
The uses of literature
24
Possessions
41
New protagonists
59
Status
84
Parasites and builders
110
Twin roots of meshchanstvo
129
Comrade Chameleon
137
Defective party partners
187
Professionals make trouble
194
Professors talk back
205
Womens Liberation confused
214
An explorer
239
Notes
256
Bibliographical note
280
Copyright

Producers
157

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About the author (1990)

Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, 1913 - 2001 Vera Sandormirsky Dunham was born in 1913. She earned her secondary education in the Soviet Union and Germany, she studied German and Slavic Philology and literature in German, French and Belgian Universities. She attained her doctorate degree in 1935 in Slavic Philology from the University of Erlangen in germany and another degree from the University of Brussels. In 1940, she emigrated to the United States and was an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington from 1944 to 1945. She is perhaps best known for her translation and critiques of Russian poetry and prose. Dunham taught in the Slavic Department at Wayne State University in Detroit from 1945 to 1976. She was a member of the Slavic review and translated poems and prose into English from Russian poets. After retiring form Wayne State, she taught or several years at Queens College, Columbia and assorted other universities. Her most well known book was entitled "In Stalin's Time: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction". Vera Sandormirsky Dunham died on March 22, 2001 in Cambridge Massachusetts at the age of 88.

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