Küchlya

<div><div><p>The poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker Pushkin's school-friend suffered twenty years of imprisonment and Siberian exile for his part in the ill-fated Decembrist rising of 1825 against the Russian autocracy. His largely forgotten life and work are vividly recreated in <em>Küchlya </em>(1925) a pioneering historical novel by the eminent literary scholar and Formalist theorist Yuri Tynianov. Writing at a time when Stalin was tightening his grip on Soviet culture and society Tynyanov implicitly brings together the disquieting experiences of the 1820s and the 1920s. In a lively innovative style his gripping and moving narrative here translated for the first time evokes the childhood youth beliefs and often absurd adventures of a Quixotic idealistic protagonist against the richly complex backdrop of post-Napoleonic Russian society.</p></div></div>