Description
Book SynopsisIn Writing Rogues de Oliveira sheds light on the picaresque and its marginal characters – rogues and storytellers – who populated the Soviet Union on paper and in real life. The picaresque afforded authors the means to articulate and reflect on the Soviet collective identity, a class-based utopia that rejected imperial power and attempted to deemphasize national allegiances.
Trade Review“A tremendously well-written and enjoyable read. Writing Rogues identifies important issues, answers big questions, and fills critical and theoretical lacunae in the scholarship. De Oliveira's approach to the Russian picaresque should serve as a model for future scholars working on the relationship between Soviet literature and Soviet culture as a whole.” Marcia A. Morris, Georgetown University and author of Writing the Time of Troubles: False Dmitry in Russian Literature
"If a rogue is a dishonest person who flouts prevailing norms, one might expect such a literary hero to embody resistance to an imposed political and social reality. Oliveira upsets that expectation in Writing Rogues and instead construes the Soviet rogue—and the genre to which the rogue belongs, the picaresque—as having a more paradoxical relationship to state power. Through readings of several prominent picaresques, Oliveira ably demonstrates how the genre performed this ‘tightrope act’ of legitimizing the state by means of protagonists who are ‘incompatible’ with it. Recommended.” Choice
