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Soviet literature of the twenties and thirties is examined in the present study in its relationship to other verbal genres, primarily, the speeches of Party leaders, newspaper rhetoric and political posters. The first four chapters of the dissertation focus on such topics as the reception of Marxist-Leninist discourse by peasants and workers as well as its representation in fiction; the refraction of official discursive formulas in characters' speech and the dialogization of Party rhetoric; the integration of political documents into fiction and their structural function. Particular attention is paid to the way the contamination of Party rhetoric by substandard language and its contextual defamiliarization lead, depending on the overall authorial intention, either to a parodic subversion of official cliches or to the internalization of didactic discourse and the enhancement of its communicative effectiveness. / The theme of industrialization is examined in the last two chapters of the thesis in its dialectic interaction with various Neo-Rousseauist conceptions, which either reflect the authors' own ambivalence about socialist construction, or constitute a rhetorical device used in order to reinforce dialogically industrialist ideology.

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In spite of the growing interest of Russian and Western scholars in Sergei Dovlatov and his art, his place in Russian literature has not yet been clearly defined. His position as a writer in Russia in the 1960s and early 70s was ambiguous due to his opposition to the traditional Soviet canon and rejection by the current literary establishment. However, he later gained recognition and popularity as an emigre writer in the United States. The concept of 'marginality' colours his biography and art, for his life itself was a succession of marginal experiences and marginality is the key topic of his writings. / Marginality unifies Dovlatov's art. This is evident in his marginal status as a writer in and outside the Soviet Union, and in his writing which uses the underappreciated short form of narration (the novella and short story), develops a non-traditional conversational style, pursues the themes of non-conventional behaviour and introduces eccentric characters. / However, it is not possible to discuss Dovlatov's status as a marginal writer without contextualizing his life and art in the ambience of the entire generation of Leningrad writers of the sixties. Writers and poets such as Brodskii, Goliavkin, Gubin, Vakhtin and Ufliand do not only represent the culture of Leningrad's artistic non-conformists, they are also Dovlatov's prototypes and protagonists. Apart from their marginal status, all these writers shared the determination to make independent choices in life and in art. They refused to be viewed as marginal authors by the dominant canon, which disregarded their works as insignificant. Here as well marginality emerges as a literary concept and a behavioural model, shaped by societal norms (the positive type of citizen or official Soviet writer) and traditional canons (the Russian didactic tradition or Soviet ideological writing). This literary concept includes an orientation towards American literature, the creation of marginal characters and themes as well as an exploration of different styles. / The works of writers of the Leningrad circle laid the foundation for the emergence of a literary phenomenon such as Dovlatov. It is in delineating this context that this dissertation demonstrates Dovlatov's original approach to marginality, as well as the way he turned his life experience into literature and became a spokesman for neglected fellow writers and citizens.

During the 70 years of the Soviet regime the officially approved Soviet literature consistently reflected an exclusively materialistic world view. As a result, there were very few critical works, published in the West, dealing with the Christian theme in Russian literature of the Soviet period. / Surprisingly, literature with the Christian theme did exist in the years of militant state atheism. Such literary works raised questions about the purpose of life, about truth, moral courage and the person of Christ. These books were published during the 60-s, the time of the "thaw", and became a focal point of public discussions. Two of them--Bulgakov's "Master i Margarita" and Pasternak's "Doktor Zhivago" were internationally acknowledged as major literary works. / This study will examine in detail and compare five literary works with christian content, published in the Soviet years of Russia. Two of them were mentioned above. The other three are "Plakha" by Aytmatov, "Dzhvari" by Alfeeva and "Fakul'tet nenizhnikh veshchei" by Dombrovsky. / The existence of such literature proves that all the efforts to suppress the human spirit and its longing for the Absolute have failed.

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Staliniana is an eclectic genre of Russian literature of the Soviet period. It deals with the fictional image of I. V. Stalin and the impact of his life and politics on history. For several decades it was the core of socialist realist literature and Stalin's personality cult. / The first chapter discusses the phenomena of Stalin's personality cult in the context of the intellectual history of the post-revolutionary Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter two offers different classifications of a vast amount of fiction written on Stalin. The genesis and documented development of staliniana is discussed in the third chapter. Special attention is paid to the manipulations in the genre exercised by ideological and cultural authorities in the USSR from the 1920s to the 1970s. The fourth chapter discusses some aspects of staliniana in Western Europe as contrasted to Soviet literature. In the fifth chapter a detailed analysis of key elements of the codified literary image of Stalin is undertaken. Chapter six explores the folklore background of Stalin's cult and its interaction with the cult of V. I. Lenin. The final chapter offers an analysis of the development of the language used by Stalin as a fictional character in works of literature. This study uses the recently declassified materials from Soviet archives in order to demonstrate that staliniana was not only a key element of the Stalin cult but also a cornerstone of Soviet literature.

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This dissertation discusses and analyses Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin's conscious strategy of self-fashioning and reinvention, which is realised in his life and supported by the theoretical constructs contained in his Collected Works. It addresses the ambiguities and uncertainties in Bakhtin's life and work and uses two aspects of his philosophical approach and constructs to explicate these inconsistencies: his theory of identity and his theory of language. The analytical tools used to arrive at this conclusion include the notion of reflexivity (using Bakhtin's own theoretical constructs to analyse incidents in his life, and in turn, using those incidents to illustrate the concepts he developed). Theoretical support for Bakhtin's self-fashioning is provided by Fitzpatrick's theory of reinvention through impersonation and imposture in Revolutionary Russia. Bakhtin's theory of identity (expressed in his Nietzsche-influenced concept of the mask and its associated concept of travesty) supports this reinvention. Bakhtin's notion of double-voicedness, supported by his linguistic theories of interdiscursivity, heteroglossia and the utterance reinforce these two lines of thought. Bakhtin's two figures of speech: the word with a 'backward glance' and the word with a 'loophole' encapsulate this convergence of theory and life. These two constructs are brought into sharp relief when illuminated by Wittgenstein's theory of language-games, Austin's concept of performativity and Benveniste's formulation of deixis. The overarching metaphor for this dissertation is the Classical Greek concept of metis, or 'cunning intelligence', a concept that is instantiated in the way in which Bakhtin framed the narrative of his life and the manner in which he performed his work. The dissertation concludes that Bakhtin evolved a multi-threaded philosophy which was self-consistent in the way in which it addressed the creation of identity, the expression of language and the performance of life and work through the metaphor of metis.