A country estate and a summer house in Soviet literature: Losses and recoveries : A collective monograph

Abstract

   In her review of the collective monograph A Country Estate and a Summer House in Soviet Literature: Losses and Recoveries [Usadba i dacha v literature sovetskoy epokhi: poteri i obreteniya] (compiled by O. Bogdanova), prepared at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Literature and funded by grant No. 22-18-00051 issued by the Russian Science Foundation, E. Kuzmina thoroughly examines the logic of the compilation, contributors, and the book’s structure. The monograph follows extensive and innovative research. It portrays the country estate and the dacha as a spiritual and artistic space. Despite the featured diversity of scholarly methods, the book reads as a product of harmoniously concerted effort. The studies cover the characteristic topoi of usadba and dacha in detail, describe the past and the present of a Russian country estate, as well as its 20th-c. incarnations, and reconstruct the relevant and adequate biographical and cultural-historical contexts. Throughout its many transformations, the country estate lives on. It suffers and rejoices together with its inhabitants and, much like a palimpsest, preserves their memories.