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Book Synopsis
In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessaas a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieushaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a place prepared for them in the Russian canon and fostered modes of storytelling that both reflected and resisted the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Stanton concludes with a rereading of Babel's autobiographical stories and examines their legacy in post-Thaw works by Kataev, Olesha, and Konstantin Paustovsky.

Isaac Babel and the SelfInvention of Odessan

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    A Hardback by Rebecca Stanton

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      View other formats and editions of Isaac Babel and the SelfInvention of Odessan by Rebecca Stanton

      Publisher: Northwestern University Press
      Publication Date: 7/31/2012 12:00:00 AM
      ISBN13: 9780810128323, 978-0810128323
      ISBN10: 0810128322

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessaas a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieushaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a place prepared for them in the Russian canon and fostered modes of storytelling that both reflected and resisted the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Stanton concludes with a rereading of Babel's autobiographical stories and examines their legacy in post-Thaw works by Kataev, Olesha, and Konstantin Paustovsky.

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