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Deming Brown's impressively wide-ranging study of the final days of Soviet Russian literature concentrates much information into a very small space. He discusses the effects of glasnost' on literature and literary criticism and provides thumbnail sketches of over sixty authors. His book will be useful to those who desire a quick overview of the Soviet literary world from 1975 to 1991, or a rough idea of the style and subject matter of individual writers during that period. Brown's skill at providing a vivid and comprehensible picture of a writer in a few paragraphs is commendable. Whether those writers will be found attractive is another matter.
The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature has several limitations, not the least of which is its steep price. The book concentrates exclusively on prose, a fact which Brown sup ports with the assertion that Russian readers now want "not flashes of poetic insight, but analysis." This seems to imply that verse and drama are nonanalytic forms, or that poetic insight cannot contribute to an understanding of political and economic upheaval. Brown occasionally refers to writers as "political liberals" but does not define his terms, an important omission in times when the traditional political terminology has been seriously compromised. He also implies that the post-1985 obsession with the past, with World War II literature and the themes of guilt and repentance, and a fascination with previously banned books are remarkable or unique, ignoring very similar...