Introduction

This book sets out to examine how politically engaged novelists of the Cold War era, Western and Soviet, conveyed their understanding of recent and contemporary history through works of fiction. The book compares Soviet and Western fictional responses to the Cold War, bearing in mind that the geographical and linguistic divide in American and European universities between 'Russian Studies' and 'Cold War Studies' has tended to impede a comparative approach. Cold War culture has, of course, not confined its attention to diplomatic and military history. Novelists have devoted more attention to the life experiences of populations living under the Soviet and Western political and socio-economic systems. Political passion returned to the Western novel with the break-up of the Cold War consensus. In academic corridors a new literary priesthood emerged, the devotees of a fiction rooted in myth, fable, fantasy, 'modern magic' – and the supposed impossibility of language.