This book completes the author's study of the sociology of the literary process in Soviet Russia, begun in "The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature" (Stanford, 1997). The author demonstrates that Socialist Realism is not so much directed as it is self-directed; the transformation of the author into his own censor is the true history of Soviet literature.

Evgeny Dobrenko is Reader in Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham.