Drawing on contemporary critical theory as well as postmodern post-Soviet literature and film, Lilya Kaganovsky discusses the ways Stalinist socialist realist fiction, and in particular, Nikolai Ostrovskii's How the Steel WasTempered, articulates the “dominant fiction” of Stalinism: that is, the relationship between heroism, male subjectivity, power, and bodily integrity. Positing two models of exemplary masculinity (the healthy and virile Stalinist subject on the one hand, and the wounded, mutilated, blind, and paralyzed, but nonetheless, celebrated male subject on the other) this essay seeks to understand what purpose bodily mutilation serves in Stalinist texts. By examining Pavka Korchagin's insatiable desire to keep returning to the “ranks” of the party despite the toll each return takes on his body, Kaganovsky points to the mechanisms of power and pleasure at work in socialist realist texts that, in turn, reflect the cultural fantasy of Stalinism— the (un)making of the New Soviet Man.

In this article Ann Komaromi examines Soviet samizdat based on recendy available materials and fresh critical approaches. Komaromi juxtaposes traditional mythologizing narratives about samizdat and the exposure of such mythology within samizdat and post-samizdat culture. Drawing on recent publications and archival investigations, Komaromi surveys the history of samizdat, its use, reception and resonance. The material form of the samizdat text proves key to understanding samizdat as the lifeblood of a community of Soviet dissenters. That material form, viewed critically through a lens shaped by poststructural concepts, provokes the sense of play between ideal signified and compromised signifier as samizdat's subversive essence. This samizdat text supports both anti-authoritarian playfulness and serious reflection on the threats to the author and the project of culture. Soviet and post-Soviet writers find in the samizdat text an ambivalent marker of their specifically Soviet identity beyond geographical and temporal boundaries of the Soviet empire.