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Gunnar Lenz publishes "Der andere Sozrealismus"
The alumnus of the Doctoral Program in Literary Studies publishes his dissertation with Böhlau Verlag in Cologne.
Gunnar Lenz completed the Doctoral Program in Literary Studies in 2015 and has since been a research assistant and lecturer at the Slavic Department of the University of Basel. In 2022, he published Der andere Sozrealismus (The Other Socialist Realism), his 400-page monograph on narrative models in Soviet literature from 1928 to 1953, with Böhlau Verlag in Cologne. The book is available in hardback and electronically as an open-access publication.
A translation of the blurb:
Establishing meaningful narratives was one of the central, politically prescribed tasks of Soviet literature in the Stalin era. In contrast to the instrumentalization of literature, little attention has therefore been paid in research on socialist realism to texts that can be read neither as classical representatives of a state-directed literature nor as its counter-design. This other socialist realism, however, is particularly relevant to the narratives of the Stalin era. In many of the works examined in this study, an astonishing range of different textual strategies between adaptation and subversion can be observed, revealing ruptures and contradictions in the narratives of the Stalin era. It also brings into sharper focus the diachronic differences between the narratives of the first Five-Year Plan, the 1930s, and the postwar period. Overall, the picture that emerges is of a literature that had, sometimes unintentionally, a much finer sensorium for the cultural and social tensions of its present than it had previously been credited with.
Congratulations, Gunnar!
Link to the publishing house to order the book or download the PDF