Chapaev and his Comrades

Angela Brintlinger (PhD University of Wisconsin) is an associate professor and the graduate studies chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages andLiteratures at Ohio State University. She is the author of Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture 1917-1937 (2000) and co-edited with Ilya Vinitsky the book Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (2007).

“Brintlinger presents a critical “defamiliarization” to stimulate another generation of readers and scholars to reexamine the tragic history of twentieth-century Russia and read its Salient writers from a new perspective. . . . Brintlinger’s introduction not only introduces the diverse set of writers, issues, and thematic priorities of her main text. It also establishes her own voice as thoughtful, resourceful, scholarly, and well informed about the vast legacy of Russian war literature. . . . Bringing to the task a broad scholarly, philosophical vision and sharp, discrete critical tools, Brintlinger has produced a formidable work. It should serve as an indispensible guide to the literature of the Russian ‘short twentieth century’ (1917—1991).”— Byron Lindsey, University of New Mexico, in the Slavic and East European Journal, 58.1 (Spring 2014)“Brintlinger has made a valuable contribution to the study of twentieth-century Russian literature by bringing the war hero out of the Socialist Realist ghetto, showing the nuances which reveal the complexities of supposedly ‘official’ texts, as well as the multiple allusions which connect them with ‘unofficial’ texts which may parody or ridicule them, but by doing so acknowledge their claim on the cultural imagination.”— Katharine Hodgson, Department of Modern Languages, University of Exeter, in the Slavonic & East European Review Vol. 92, No. 2, April 2014“Clearly written, Chapaev and his Comrades is invaluable to scholars of war culture and scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet literature. . . . this volume contributes greatly to the body of scholarship addressing the field of Soviet war literature, an understudied field in the West.”— Adrienne M. Harris, Baylor University; review published in The Russian Review, October 2013 (Vol. 72, No. 4)“Chapaev and His Comrades represents an important contribution to an already robust body of scholarly works on the theme of the hero in Russian literature, its specific merit being that it provides us with a comprehensive and nuanced reading of how Soviet and post-Soviet identity shaped itself around a century of almost constant war. . . . Brintlinger’s monograph is an engaging one, and it adds significantly to our understanding of how Russian identity was constructed by the major conflicts of the twentieth century. Chapaev and His Comrades will be of interest to Slavists but also to those interested in peace and conflict studies.”— Keith Livers (University of Texas, Austin), in the Slavic Review, vol. 73, no. 4 (Winter 2014)