Rogers, Thomas F.
Thomas F. Rogers is Senior Professor of Russian literature at Brigham Young University, where he served as Director of the Honors Program.
1992 0-7734-9849-4This 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 include: 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 themes: 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.
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