Myth and Symbol in Soviet Fiction Images of the Savior Hero, Great Mother,

This book outlines the archetypes of Soviet fiction, showing the remarkably recurrent and largely unconscious pattern from one author to the next over a period of some seven decades in Soviet letters. Authors include: Zamyatin, Babel, Olesha, Pil'nyak, Platonov, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Rasputin, Aytmatov, and the film-maker Tarkovsky. A number of these writers' narratives are, on the surface, highly fragmented and obscure, and most are still not well-known by nonspecialists in the West. This archetypal elucidation renders their writing intelligible and meaningful to a wider readership. The concluding chapter reviews the following ancillary themes: the authors' generally tragic philosophical ambivalence; their powerful and uncompromising use of psychosexual imagery; their synthesis of archaic and Judeo-Christian symbols; their implicit commentary on the role of the artist as catalyst for sensitization and social reform; and the reflection in their writing of their personal circumstances and world view vis-a-vis the Soviet regime and the historical period during which each lived.