Soviet Sociology of Literature: Conceptions of a Changing World

It is to be expected that a period of openness and restructuring in Russian culture, a period of glasnost' and perestroika, would be accompanied by a serious examination of the representations and institutions of literary art, since this has been the cultural activity within which and around which Russian intellectuals have examined their society and its movements since the late eighteenth century. To a considerable extent this interrogation of the literary process marks the present period, as the essays presented below testify.