Writing Russian Lives

<p>Like many genres biography came belatedly to Russia. As with other such late arrivals biography underwent intensive growth in quantity sophistication cultural significance and popularity from the era of Nicholas I onwards. It stands today as a dominant force in post-Soviet publishing. Yet studies of Russian biography’s poetics and its role as a literary and cultural institution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain thin on the ground a fact often lamented yet not fully addressed in the scattered writings on the subject. The present volume examines modern Russian biography as a literary form a publishing phenomenon and a cultural force that reveals and contests hegemonic ideas of the role of the individual in society and of the make-up of the human personality itself. </p>