“Soviet Gothic” is a paradoxical literary concept: how could any aesthetic system as morbid and backwards-looking as the Gothic mesh with the dynamic, progressive and rationalist society of Soviet Russia? Nonetheless, Gothic themes were widely disseminated within early Soviet literature. In Soviet Russia, Gothic had many uses: as a vehicle for propaganda (Maxim Gorky’s classic 1907 novel Mat’ [Mother] depicts judges as bloodthirsty vampires), as a response to societal trauma (the forerunner of French Gothic fiction, the roman noir, was coeval with the French Revolution), and as a space for the exploration of cultural anxieties (Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 novel Sobach’e serdtse [Heart of a Dog] parodies Russia’s then-topical obsessions with rejuvenation and eugenics). The Gothic mode was also an aesthetic choice made by individual writers (such as the recently rediscovered Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky). Since all the...
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Citation: Maguire, Muireann. "Soviet Gothic". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 March 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=16294, accessed 09 June 2026.]
