The collapse of the Soviet Union forced Russia to engage in a process of nation building. This
involved a reassessment of the past both historical and cultural and how it should be
remembered. The publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works
presented an opportunity to reappraise «official» Soviet literature and re-evaluate
twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole. This book explores changes to the poetry canon
- an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory - to show how cultural memory
has informed the evolution of post-Soviet Russian identity. It examines how concerns over
identity are shaping the canon and in which directions and analyses the interrelationship
between national identity (whether ethnic imperial or civic) and attempts to revise the
canon. This study situates the discussion of national identity within the cultural field and in
the context of canon formation as a complex expression of aesthetic political and
institutional factors. It encompasses a period of far-reaching upheaval in Russia and reveals
the tension between a desire for change and a longing for stability that was expressed by
attempts to reshape the literary canon and by doing so to create a new twentieth-century past
and the foundations of a new identity for the nation.
