The Soviet Novel as a Work of Grief

The Soviet novel is considered in this chapter as a unique mechanism for working through the historical trauma of the Soviet experience, and its history is seen as stages of acceptance of trauma. This allows us to connect the history of the main genre for Russian literature of the twentieth century with the key events of Soviet history, full of violence, rupture, destruction, and loss. The late Soviet novels of a synthetic (epic) nature bore the features of post-traumatic syndrome. The need to work through trauma ensured the status of the novel in Russian literature of the twentieth century as perhaps the only platform for doing this, and reinforced the traditional literary-centrism of Russian culture.