Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The Visit to the Museum’ (1939) Petersburg is a dystopian dreamscape reached through a portal in a haunted museum. In the early twentieth century Ivan Bunin Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov used supernatural imagery and settings to convey the internal decay of imperial Russia and the chaotic Communist society that replaced it. Yet the Revolution of 1917 allegedly imposed a full stop to this rich tradition of Gothic fantasy in 1934 the official adoption of Socialist Realism as Russia’s literary programme effectively excluded any other kind of fiction from publication for the next half-century. In that year the Soviet novelist and bureaucrat Konstantin Fedin announced that fantastic literature including Gothic had been “shut in its coffin”! Such official disavowals however overlooked the lingering persistence of Gothic literature within the gates. Bulgakov two of whose early stories appear in this collec tion continued writing supernatural fiction long after delib- crate censorship had stifled his career: he entrusted his last and greatest novel The Master and Margarita (1940) to his wife for safekeeping. (It finally appeared in print in 1966-67.) (LL)