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Part V explores the relationship between the dramatic history of the twentieth century and the transformations of Russian literary culture and poetics, arguing that the story is one of unexpected continuities as much as rupture. The Part outlines the development of Russian modernism and the avant-garde in the Silver Age (1890s–1917), moving on to the avant-garde poetics and institutions reinvented in late Soviet (1960s–early 1980s), and treating underground and post-Soviet literature (since 1991), as well as the émigré literature of Russia Abroad. Émigré and Soviet literature are shown to follow some similar patterns and themes, just as official and underground literature alike explore ways to represent the century’s catastrophes, and to test the responsibilities of the intelligentsia. The desire to break with the past emerges as a theme, as does a struggle over forms of cultural continuity. Women writers play key roles across multiple time periods, locales, and aesthetic forms. Part V analyzes the workings of political and aesthetic censorship during the domination of Socialist Realism, and it explores poetry as a discourse of subjectivity. It includes attention to utopian/dystopian and national narratives, and ends with an account of the intelligentsia’s cultural and historical self-identification.

Postwar futurismo included Anarchists and Socialists, such as Vinicio Paladini, Ivo Pannaggi, Avgust Cernigoj and Ruggero Vasari. This chapter explores the manner in which radical futurists welcomed the machine as a conduit of proletarian redemption and harbinger of new social and class orders. Austere and ascetic, utopian or dystopian, an emblem of rigour and discipline to engage with in the factory, the machine was instrumental in exploding social hierarchies. Conversant with the Bauhaus, voluntarily or forcibly exiled and in tension with the reactionary futurist officialdom back home, left-wing futurists were marked by a perpetual displacement and dislocated, frontier identities. The chapter includes a section on futurist music (especially Silvio Mix).

A central theme of narrative prose and dramatic theater remained the conflict between an individual and society, increasingly specified as the clash of a man or woman with ongoing historical destruction. Prose and drama, like poetry, tested the formation of new subjectivities in response to historical catastrophe. Alongside the manifestations of Socialist Realism and its derivatives, the century-long evolution of the utopian/dystopian is traced. Attention is paid to the aesthetics of the grotesque and to the poetics of skaz, to an emerging trend of existentialist narrative and the flourishing women’s prose. Also important is the quasi-fictional mode best described as “in-between prose.” The continuous exploration of identity through changing literary genres, including resurgent modernist forms, runs through the diverse case studies.