This book offers a selection of papers on Russian literature, of the Soviet period, presented at the IVth World Congress for Soviet and East European studies in 1990. The papers range from studies of the experimental prose and drama of the 1920s and early 1930s to examinations of the cruel realism of some young writers of the Gorbachev era, and of the way that Stalin and Stalinism are now being represented in Russian literature in the age of glasnost, with art spurring historians out to seek answers to questions about Russia's recent past.