This new edition of In Stalin’s Time, which brings back into print Vera Dunham’s 1976 landmark study of popular fiction in the Soviet Union during the Stalin regime, is updated to include new material by the author and a new introduction by Richard Sheldon. Dunham describes how the middle-brow or postwar establishmentarian literature of the Stalinist period was a product of a “Big Deal” intended to propagate values and establish an alliance between the regime and the middle class. Both descriptive and analytical, Dunham’s complex picture of “high totalitarianism” not only reveals insights into the details of Soviet life but illuminates important theoretical questions about the role of literature in the political structure of Soviet society.

Review

"In Stalin's time not only provides a valuable assessment of the relation between literature and social values in the Soviet Union, it also offers another perspective of the milieu that Solzhenitsyn portrays so effectively in The First Circle" The Slavic Review In praise of the first edition: "No one could have predicted that a book which investigates in scholarly detail the official literary product of Stalin's time would turn out to be - as this work is - a literary gem... The book is a tour de force of delightful complexity." - Russian Review "Professor Dunham is not the first to use Soviet literature for insights into la vie Sovietique... Yet no one else ... has done it with as much sagacity, humor, and verve as Dunham. Nor, to my knowledge, has anyone else dealt so perceptively with the function of popular dissent in the USSR." - Dissent "This stunning book, by a literary scholar, is surely one of the finest studies of Soviet Russian society ever to appear ... [Dunham's] work is first-class literary sociology. What is simply breathtaking about the book is Dunham's picture of Soviet culture-in-becoming during the late Stalin years." - American Journal of Sociology

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