This remarkable volume is at once a history of a book and an attempt to come to terms with the traumatic experience of a man and his generation. Thomas Lahusen was doing research on Far from Moscow, a classic socialist realist novel by a writer named Vasilii Azhaev, when he made an astonishing discovery. Azhaev had assembled an extensive personal archive integrating his personal history with the political history of his time.

Drawing on the archive, Lahusen reconstructs the genesis, writing, reworking, and reception of the Stalin Prize novel. He leads us from a forced labor camp to the highest reaches of the Soviet literary bureaucracy and back again, in the process helping us better to understand the failure of the bold Soviet effort to integrate literature and life, utopia and reality.

Blending historical analysis, fiction, biography, and even autobiography, Lahusen gives us an unrivaled picture of the vicissitudes of literature and life in Stalin's Russia. The volume includes an array of rare illustrations depicting moments in Azhaev's life and that of his generation. The result is a book that frames in new and provocative ways the questions that continue to baffle and terrify anyone who seriously contemplates the Stalinist era.