Books in the Myths and Taboos in Russian Culture series

Containing analyses of everything from prisoner poetry to album covers, this book moves beyond the simplistic good/evil paradigm that often accompanies Gulag scholarship. While acknowledging the normative power of Stalinism-an ethos so hegemonic it wanted to harness the very mechanisms of inspiration-the volume also recognises the various loopholes offered by artistic expression.

Highlights the philosophical and literary idea of apocalypse within key examples in the Slavic world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Russian realism to avant-garde painting, the fiction of the nineteenth century to twentieth-century philosophy, the concepts of ""end of history"" and ""end of present time"" are specifically examined.