During the politically turbulent period from the late 1950s through the mid 1970s--starting with Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev's "Thaw" (de-Stalinization and moderate ideological liberalization policy) and ending with the stabilization of Leonid Il'ich Brezhnev's corrupt and oppressive regime--two distinct trends were developing in Russian literature. One may be characterized as a continuation of sociopsychological, sometimes satirical, realism in the style of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. The majority of writers whose works belonged to this trend and who are sometimes categorized as authors of either derevenshchiki (Village Prose) or gorodoskaic proza (City Literature) lived in the provinces or in Moscow; considered the journal Novyi mir (The New World) their main tribune; and saw their works published--although often these publications were mutilated by censors and subsequently attacked by ideological watchdogs. The other trend was a resurgence of the modernist tradition, which had been completely trampled upon in Joseph Stalin's...