Publisher's Synopsis
Historical fiction has not only been a resource of political legitimation and cultural self-orientation since late socialism, but also a central field for negotiating new systems of knowledge in Soviet and Russian society. The work describes this function with the term metahistoriography. On the one hand, it examines the literary problematization of the art-external conditions of historical knowledge formation and examines its social, institutional and ideological requirements. On the other hand, it focuses on the art-internal conditions of historical knowledge such as the formal structuring, genre poetics, narrative structure and mediality of historical fiction. Such a function-poetological text access makes literature readable as an essential medium of indication and inspiration of a changed social order in the field of tension between system breakdown and system formation.
