Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921–1938

How Russian literature about socially marginal characters came to define what it means to be Soviet.

In Writing Rogues de Oliveira sheds light on the picaresque and its marginal characters – rogues and storytellers – who populated the Soviet Union on paper and in real life. The picaresque afforded authors the means to articulate and reflect on the Soviet collective identity, a class-based utopia that rejected imperial power and attempted to deemphasize national allegiances.