Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants before Tito by Samuel Foster (review)

Abstract

literature to the Gulag. At the same time, Colombo demonstrates how the perception of the hidden enemy gradually transformed from a non-proletarian individual of ‘alien’ class origin into a person with the wrong, i.e. Jewish, background. Colombo follows the same methodology in the next section, including a chapter on the single most popular author of Soviet spy thrillers, Iulian Semenov and his famous novel Seventeen Moments of Spring (), which was adapted for television in  by Tatʹiana Lioznova with outstanding success. He combines his presentation of individual writers with discussion of major contemporaneous ideas, slogans, and stereotypes absorbed by Russian spy fiction, offering a variety of intriguing facts and equally intriguing interpretations. Two aspects of Colombo’s monograph perturbed me somewhat. Firstly, in his Introduction he argues rather passionately that the subject of his study is exclusively the ‘spy thriller’. I feel he should not have insisted on this point as, from a conventional point of view, he addresses various narrative genres and their hybrids: besides the spy thriller, he draws upon adventure, detective, political, and other novels. Moreover, his attempt to isolate the spy thriller as a genre is unconvincing and time-consuming. Secondly, I found the style and structure of the book a little confusing, rather like a spy thriller itself, full of unexpected changes of time and place, plot twists, and new perspectives. But these objections are minor: crucially, Colombo’s book is new, timely, and very good. T I  R L (P H)   R A  S S P S U V V