Stalin's Ghosts

Contents: What is Soviet Gothic? ¿ Gothic Castles ¿ Gothic Bodies ¿ Gothic Death ¿ Gothic Monsters ¿ Gothic Returns.

Muireann Maguire is Career Development Fellow in Russian Literature and Culture at Wadham College, Oxford. Her research interests include Gothic aspects of Soviet literature, Russian émigré prose, and the representation of science and scientists in Russian literary and cinematic culture since 1850. Red Spectres, her translated selection of twentieth-century Russian Gothic tales, was published in 2012.

«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)

«It is not possible within the space of a limited review to do full justice to the scope and force of this analysis.»
(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)