num_pages: 344
description: 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 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 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.
language: English
title: Myth and Symbol in Soviet Fiction: Images of the Savior Hero, Great Mother, Anima, and Child in Selected Novels and Films
titlecomplete: Myth and Symbol in Soviet Fiction: Images of the Savior Hero, Great Mother, Anima, and Child in Selected Novels and Films (Studies in Slavic Language & Literature)
publisher: Edwin Mellen Pr