The positive hero in Russian literature

The positive hero was defined by the Soviets as one who set "an example for the reader's behavior." As early as 1860, the merits of this ideal model were a central issue in the war between the literary imagination and ideological criticism that raged in Russia for a hundred years. In The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, Rufus Mathewson, Jr., brings a period of Russian literature to life and demonstrates how the battles over the positive hero reappeared with dramatic clarity in the dissident literary movement that developed following Stalin's death. Mathewson argues that the true continuity in Russian prose, joining the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was to be found in this persistent conflict between contrary views of the real nature and proper uses of literature. This new edition of a widely acclaimed work, first published in 1958 and covering literary developments through 1946, includes chapters on Belinsky, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and Sinyavsky.