“The Past for the Literary Present” Book Review: Ivanova N.B. Text and Context. Works on Russian Literature. Moscow, Vremya Publ., 2024. 904 p.

The review examines Natalia Ivanova’s book “Text and Context. Works on Russian Literature”. The importance of this book for the history of Russian literature and criticism of the 20th–21st centuries is shown. This is a detailed panorama of Russian literature: articles, notes, speeches by N. Ivanova over four and a half decades. The book is structured chronologically. The principle of text selection is the development of Russian literature from the 1980s to the 2020s, its turns and possibilities are tracked. The book consists of three parts. The fi rst of them (“From Great Expectations to Lost Illusions”) is devoted to works written in the early 1980s, before, in the atmosphere of foreboding, and starting from 1986 – during “perestroika and glasnost”. The second (“Change of Language”) is devoted to the problems of the destruction and formation of the canon, the change of language, the border between eras, genre repertoire, fi ction and non-fi ction, autobiographical prose as well as such phenomena as default and the devaluation of literature. This part is connected with the next one, which presents polemics in its pure form (“Literary Canon and Literary Capital”). There are many heroes: from Yuri Trifonov and Fazil Iskander to Andrei Bitov, Vladimir Makanin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from Tatyana Tolstaya to Viktor Pelevin and Mikhail Shishkin, Vladimir Sharov, etc. Several “heroes” are collective – literary politics; the award process; criticism as a changing institution; thick journals. Together, these components of the book illuminate the complex, sometimes contradictory literary process of the 20th–21st centuries.