Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction
presents an advanced introduction to the work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, focusing on the concepts of carnival, dialogism, and historicism. The discussion of Bakhtin pays particular attention to the impact of his historical context in the Soviet Union and to the importance of his own dialogic mode of discourse. Bakhtin's ideas are then placed in dialogic relation to the works of several important writers of modern Russian fiction, including Vassily Aksyonov, Ilf and Petrov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Andrei Bitov, and Sasha Sokolov.