How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia

"This is a wonderfully original work: a history of a book, a literary analysis of an age, a montage of a life. Lahusen writes with a postmodern sensibility but without the postmodernist jargon."--Yuri Slezkine, University of California, Berkeley

"Thomas Lahusen has written an imaginative and archivally grounded book that presents the most fascinating picture to date of the literary process that produced canonical works of Socialist Realism and the people who wrote them. How Life Writes the Book is alternatingly chilling and funny as it demonstrates the interpenetration of literary institutions, massive construction projects and the Soviet system of prison camps and slave labor. With this study, as with his earlier Intimacy and Terror, Lahusen continues his own project of revolutionizing our understanding of the Soviet subject and Soviet subjectivity."--Eric Naiman, University of California, Berkeley

"Lahusen's case study marks a new genre of inquiry into the very nature of socialist realism, a genre which became possible after archives and memory in Russia regained their voice. It shows how life is transformed into Soviet myth."--Hans Gnther, editor of The Culture of the Stalin Period