Bücher von Dmitry Shlapentokh

This book examines the interplay between key rulers and intellectuals in creating and sustaining popular discourses that often help keep rulers in power.

Vasily Yan (Vassily Grigoryevich Yanchevetsky, 1874¿1954) was a writer of historical novels whose popularity survives the test of time. He was widely read throughout the Soviet era and continues to be popular in the post-Soviet era. This book is not just a biographical sketch of an important Russian/Soviet writer basically unknown to the Western public. The focus on Yan and his work also impressively demonstrates the dominant role of ideology in a totalitarian society, which is not just a socio-economic and political system of the past, but could reemerge in the future as ISIS has demonstrated. Shlapentokh shows that ideology and the cultural and intellectual life in totalitarian regimes are more complex than is often assumed. Intellectuals often enough engaged in stressful, but¿in its literary outcome¿captivating ¿cat and mouse¿ games with censors, the powerful, and the government.

The interest of Russian intellectuals in the French Revolution demonstrates that some Russian thinkers of the 19th century had begun to question the concept of Russia's uniqueness. They saw, perhaps correctly, that the Western experience, with the French Revolution as its symbol, was foreign to Russian destiny.