Novel histories: repudiation of Soviet historiography in the works of Iurii Trifonov, Vladimir Makanin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia
Journal: Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Year: 2019

Aspects of Stalinist historiography have influenced the style of late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian prose fiction. Through a simplified linear plot, archetypically heroic and villainous characterizations, and catechismal rhetoric, the Soviet leadership manipulated Russian history to justify their own power. Soviet historiographical methods of emplotment and characterization as well as narrative and rhetorical devices form a stratum of meaning in the fiction of Iurii Trifonov, Vladimir Makanin,