Labour camps, known for most of their seven decades by the acronym GULag (Main Administration of Camps), were a defining feature of the Soviet system, and one of its most baleful legacies. Concentrated in peripheral, hostile environments, they showed disregard for human life and health and resulted in mass death and disability. The release of millions from the camps, especially in the amnesties of the early post-Stalin years (1953–6), created a vast network of survivors, with many seeking to testify to their experiences.

Walking down an aisle of a Russian bookstore or library, one sees numerous books with the title Rasskazy i povesti. This common title for an author’s collected works is difficult to translate: it could be ‘short stories and short novels’ or ‘short and long stories’. As these awkward pairings show, the povest' occupies the space between the short story and the novel, both in length and in the scope of its engagement with its subject.

The terms ‘salon’ and ‘circle’ refer to a particular type of literary group that has shaped Russian culture since the seventeenth century, with its influence peaking in the 1820s and 1830s. Unlike literary societies, these communities have rarely had any formal membership, written rules or programmatic documents. Instead, they have tended to favour friendly chats on various subjects, literary recitations, and discussions on certain days of week, sometimes accompanied by musical performances. These practices engender strong personal bonds and shared memories. Some of these communities have created their own ‘circle languages’ with recurrent motifs, inside jokes, and domestic mythologies, which in turn have framed their literary output. The chapter reconstructs their activities by examining that output alongside secret-police reports. Viewed from this perspective, the history of literary circles and salons can be seen as the history of the vanished ‘everyday life’ of their participants.

During the age of devotion, monasteries were the dominant institutions for the production, preservation, and consumption of books. This chapter uses a spatial device to map the character and range of monastic writing and reading. Monastic book consumption is described in terms of three zones. The first zone is the church, with the books needed for the performance of the liturgy and to support services every day of the year. The second zone can be represented by the refectory or other communal space, where the monastic Rule advised that, rather than engage in idle chatter, the brethren should listen to the reading of instructive and edifying texts. The third zone is the individual cell, the zone of texts for private reading. The chapter’s main temporal focus is on the period from the late fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century, the main age of monastic expansion.

This chapter examines the history of the Russian novel after 1900 as a cyclical reworking or recycling of two traditions stretching back to the nineteenth century. The first, harmonious tradition is associated with Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Lev Tolstoi, while the second, disharmonious one follows the examples of Nikolai Gogol, Nikolai Leskov, and Fedor Dostoevskii. The Modernist novel inherited the second trend in the early twentieth century, while the Socialist Realist novel tried to inherit the first one thereafter. The post-Stalinist critical novel combined both trends, and more recently the Postmodernist novel has thrived on a programmatic break from national traditions. In turn, this liberation has coincided with the end of literocentrism in Russia, as the novel has ceased to be the repository and domain of national identity, and instead become an arena for play, fantasy, imagination, modelling, and learning – a space of freedom.

This chapter examines the phenomenon that has become known as samizdat: the self-publishing of secular literature as a reaction to state censorship in the second half of the twentieth century. Samizdat is conceptualised as a means by which Soviet citizens procured what the centrally organised cultural sphere would not provide: interesting or informative texts that people wanted to read. The chapter provides detail on famous texts that were first circulated in samizdat, on different genres of samizdat such as literary journals, and on the manufacturing and distribution of samizdat materials, including ‘tamizdat’ or the smuggling into the USSR of books printed abroad. Ultimately, samizdat emerges not merely as a way of distributing texts, but also as a network of grassroots networks – a way for people to organise outside official channels in the context of a system which suppressed private and civic initiative.

This chapter argues that the spoken word had special significance in the Russian literary tradition due to censorship and other constraints on the printed word, and also because of the cultural chasm between a small, educated elite and a weakly literate majority. It begins with Baroque rhetoric in the eighteenth century before examining the role of oral performance and rhetoric in the Romantic era. It then shows a reinvigoration of literature’s oral dimension from the reform era of the 1860s through to the early twentieth century, as writers became public readers of their work and the educated elite sought to render a popular ‘voice’ in literary form. Following a repressive hiatus in the Stalin period, the spoken word had its heyday in the postwar era: guitar poetry, a popular form of urban folklore, entered the field of literature, while poets achieved national fame as performers as well as published authors.

It is a truism to say that medieval literature was largely anonymous. Chronicles accumulated over the centuries without indication of author or compiler. Scores of saints’ lives were composed, expanded, redacted, and paraphrased by unnamed writers and editors. It can be surprising, therefore, to find that the use of the first-person singular is not as uncommon as the truism might imply. Who is he (the first-person singular is almost invariably male), and what are his roles and functions?

The figure of the madman has been invoked in Russian literature from the medieval period to the present day. This chapter investigates the evolution of that tradition with an emphasis on the period from Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. It identifies four strains of literary madness: the divine madman, exemplified by the holy fool who tests society’s virtue and speaks truth to power; the creative madman, whose irrational behaviour stems from poetic inspiration and the generative power of the word; the rational madman, who follows a logical system to pathological extremes or inverts that paradigm by revolting against reason; and the political madman, whose sanity is often pathologised by a society that itself has lost its mind. Together, these paradigms of madness constitute an intertextual web of allusions and character types that have been embodied and amended over time.

The peasant as a protagonist in Russian literature emerged in the late eighteenth century in comic operas and Nikolai Karamzin’s short fiction. By the 1850s, the genre of ‘stories from the life of peasants’ had become widespread, and included the depiction of Ukrainian peasants. Its popularity hinged on the fact that peasant ‘other’ came to serve as an idealised image of national character. This chapter focuses in most detail on the period between the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the Russian Revolution in 1917, when the models used for depicting peasants were most diverse, and the ‘grey muzhik’, or average peasant, featured in the work of many writers. Under Stalin, the free-labour peasant disappeared from Russian literature due to collectivisation and repressions, only to re-emerge in the Village Prose of the late Soviet period as writers transformed citizens of collective farms into nostalgic images of a lost Russia.

Newly available evidence has shed new light on the inner workings of the socialist state in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In a “campaign against modern revisionism” in 1964 the militant faction within the Vietnamese Workers’ Party led by Lê Duẩn sidelined those members who favored a more cautious approach to the struggle for the reunification of the country. After the outbreak of the war, the propaganda machine in the DRV including writers and other artists had to foster popular support for the war and keep morale among civilians and soldiers high. The DRV Ministry of Public Security enforced ideological conformity and after 1965 intensified its efforts to track down and eliminate any party members and individuals who dissented from the aggressive line of the party leadership. Thus, in 1967, in the wake of the Tet Offensive the security apparatus lashed out against those who did not fully support Lê Duẩn’s risky plan for a general offensive and were not deemed fully reliable. The fact that many of those arrested or put under house arrest were close to General Võ Nguyên Giáp shows that the “Antiparty Revisionist Affair,” as the purge came to be known, was also part of internal factional infighting in Hanoi.

The environmental history of the Vietnam War is unique in the twentieth century for the unprecedented scale of aerial bombing and use of incendiaries such as napalm, as well as the United States military’s use of tactical herbicides to destroy forest cover in combat zones. Drawing on recent trends in environmental and military history, this chapter aims to provide a more comprehensive sketch of the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War. Besides the effects of bombing and herbicides, these include inquiries into the footprints of warfare in urban and industrial development, in ethnic and demographic shifts in former warzones, in the dispersion of invasive species, and even in the creation of wilderness or conservation areas.

Politics in South Vietnam (aka the Republic of Vietnam) have long been overlooked in most English-language accounts of the Vietnam War, especially during the final years of the conflict. But the breakdown of the Saigon government’s legitimacy in the eyes of its own anti-Communist constituents during this period was decisive in determining the outcome of the war. This chapter explores the wave of anti-Communist solidarity that swept through South Vietnam’s cities and provincial towns following the 1968 Communist Tet Offensive. It analyzes the South Vietnamese state’s ambitious efforts to implement economic, agricultural, and political reforms. And it demonstrates that President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s bid to monopolize political power, following clashes with South Vietnam’s civilian parties and institutions, dealt a fatal blow to the establishment of legitimate anti-Communist government in the South. Thiệu’s autocratic turn betrayed the constitutional order on which the state’s authority was based, deflating post-Tet enthusiasm, accelerating American funding cuts, and precipitating South Vietnam’s collapse from within during the final Communist offensive in 1975. Drawing on newly available Vietnamese-language sources, the chapter examines the underappreciated impact of a diverse range of Vietnamese protagonists, who shaped the decisive political breakdown that brought the Vietnam War to its conclusion.

At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the Communist party-state has sponsored one project after another to commemorate that inspired and frenzied age. Memoirs, shrines, sculptures, paintings, fiction and film, each in its own way, lent awe to the revolution. By the mid-1980s – the high noon of market reforms – people from all walks of life began to lay claim to that past, ushering in something of a “commemorative fever.” This chapter examines how Vietnamese letters and the arts met the call to re-examine the Vietnam War, what forms they took, and how the many highroads to history, official and private, cut across one another.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.