Overview

Aksyonov, Venedikt Erofeev, Limonov, and Sokolov, children of the sixties and seventies, were among the first to test the limits of glasnost in the post-Stalin period. Although their major novels suggest a shared modernist belief in the power of verbal art to provide a place or promise of truth, and, perhaps, salvation, they set out first to recapture, for their abused native tongue, its ability to mean. They called into question the literary conventions concerning logicality, coherence, and propriety. Through their own aberrant discourse they sought to mean anew. Long in need of thorough explication, their works constitute the missing link between the alternative prose writers of the nineties and Russia's pre-Soviet literary heritage.

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This is an extremely useful and intelligent study, one that helps us to see the linguistic 'strangeness' of these contemporary novels as something entirely motivated and, if you will, 'logically illogical' and, 'coherently incoherent'. These are all important writers of important works, and Cynthia Simmons's critical optic provides the best means thus far for viewing the Aksyonov-Erofeev-Limonov-Sokolov constellation as part of a single, richly evolving process. What was once post-soviet culture 'avant la lettre' has now become post-Soviet culture 'tout court. (David M. Bethea, University of Wisconsin) Professor Simmons's study focuses on a quartet of major novels that all appeared in the late 70's: Aksyonov's 'The Burn', Erofeev's 'Moscow-Petushki', Limonov's 'It's Me, Eddie', and Sasha Sokolov's 'School for Fools'. These 'aberrant' novels are analysed via a series of novel interpretive frameworks drawn from a remarkable range of sources, including Halliday's discourse analysis, Bakhtin's theories of culture, Freudian and Jungian psychology, recent sociological and anthropological theory, semiotics and deconstruction. Dr. Simmons offers a new basis for the definition of a liminal generation of Russian writers. (D. Barton Johnson, University of California at Santa Barbara) Professor Simmons has produced an unusual book the like of which we shall probably not see for quite some time. It is a pathfinding work and deserves to be read by all with...an interest in the development of contemporary Russian prose. (Arnold McMillin, The Slavonic Review) Die vorliegende Untersuchung zeichnet sich durch methodologische Flexibilitaet aus, die mit Hilfe von strukturalistischen Verfahren und poststrukturalistischen Eingriffen in die Textgefuege ein extrem schwieriges Terrain russischer Erzaehlliteratur auslotet. (Wolfgang Schlott, Osteuropa) I would recommend 'Their Fathers' Voice' to anyone seriously concerned with the writings of Aksenov, Erofeev, Limonov and Sokolov. (Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slavonic and East European Journal)

Author Information

The Author: Cynthia Simmons is a Visiting Associate Professor in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she came from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received a B.A. from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from Brown University. She is an editor of For Henry Kucera: Studies in Slavic Philology and Computational Linguistics and author of numerous articles on twentieth-century Russian and Croatian literatures and the poetics of discourse.

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