In the latter half of the sixteen-year period with which this book has been concerned, the Soviet Russian literary community made a giant, and largely successful, effort toward recovering those parts of the Russian literary heritage which the communist regime had denied it for many decades. Not only did it rediscover its own literature that had been lost or buried; it also resumed the full contact with twentieth-century world literature, especially that of the West, which Soviet rule had severely limited. And it made enormous progress toward joining forces with the community of Russian emigre literature after decades of compulsory separation.

A concomitant of these swift and dramatic developments was a marked growth of interest in the Russian national identity, the peculiarities of the Russian character, the essence of “Russianness.” This interest, of course, had never died, and had increased in recent decades, notably through the efforts of the “village writers.” The decay of Soviet rule, however, brought a marked decline in “Soviet” consciousness, as writers turned away from ideological categories and measurements and replaced them with cultural and ethnic concerns. Writers increasingly examined Russians not as political animals but as human beings with unique and ancient roots and patterns of behavior and belief, religion included.

A marked increase of writers' interest in the irrational and the supernatural is evident in this period. The exorcism of Stalinism, which occupied the literary community so intensely in the latter half of the 1980s, brought about, incidentally, the final interment of socialist realism.