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The Soviet Spy Thriller - Writers, Power, and the Masses, 1938-2002 (Hardcover, New edition)
Loot Price: R2,320
Discovery Miles 23 200
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The Soviet Spy Thriller - Writers, Power, and the Masses, 1938-2002 (Hardcover, New edition)
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Total price: R2,340
Discovery Miles: 23 400
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It is commonly held among scholars that there was no mass
literature in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years. What should
we do, then, with Lev Ovalov's Major Pronin or with the stories of
Lev Sheinin, which began to appear in the mid-1930s? And what about
Nikolai Shpanov's post-war best-sellers? As The Soviet Spy Thriller
demonstrates, the Soviet authorities did not like to admit that
they published low-quality literature aimed at the uncultured
masses, but they greatly valued its propaganda value. These works
represented a break with the 'Red Pinkerton' tradition of the
1920s: the genre was being reinvented along new lines, with a new
seriousness, and documentary pretensions. The building of a new
kind of spy thriller also required a new enemy. Between the late
1930s and the early 1950s, the Soviet spy thriller reflects the
shift from an obsession with class to a new preoccupation with
nationality, as the Soviet Union constructed a new identity for
itself in a rapidly changing world. The same identity discourse
underwent another transformation in the post-Stalin years, when the
Soviet agent, underground in the enemy camp, became a metaphor for
double life of the 'Soviet man'. A landmark new survey of a genre
little known in the West, The Soviet Spy Thriller shines new light
on cultural politics in the Soviet Union, and offers a fascinating
counterpoint to the Western spy thrillers that will be so familiar
to most readers.
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