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M. Keith Booker, Dubravka Juraga. Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Action: Carnival, Dialogism, and History. Westport, Ct. Greenwood. 1995. xiv + 181 pages. $49.95. ISBN 0-313-29526-3.
Delivering Russian post-Stalinist literature from the grip of political and esthetic monologism is how one might encapsulate the multidimensional agenda of Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction. M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga's ambitious study of the prose of Ilf and Petrov, Zoshchenko, Aksyonov, Aleshkovsky, Bitov, and Sokolov, major writers of twentieth-century Russia, seeks to disavow the univocal appropriation of the legacy of Stalinism and forge, in a truly Bakhtinian stance, an awareness of the multiplicity of possible voices and dialogic perspectives. Throughout the book the monologic stasis of the Stalinist regime operates largely as a cipher for literary monologism, a parallel sanctioned by Bakhtin's assertion of the permeability of the boundary between fiction and reality.
Eschewing the imposition of any authoritative exegesis, Booker and Juraga advance an intensely double-voiced critical inquiry. Carnival in Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World is decoded as both...