Modern Language Review

Spy fiction is not merely about entertainment. As is well known, it conjures up an army of countless hidden enemies who might at any moment transform from fictional characters into a force that shapes the policy of an entire state. This is why Duccio Colombo’s book is pioneering not only in the field of Russian mass culture studies, as the first monograph to focus exclusively on the history of Russian spy fiction, but also as a source of insight into recent history and current events in Russia. Indeed, through his discussion of spy fiction, Colombo demonstrates the mechanics of power in both the USSR and post-Soviet Russia.

Colombo’s thesis is that in the USSR the spy thriller occupied ‘a specific field separate from the Socialist Realist mainstream’ (p. 9) which the Soviet authorities nonetheless tolerated because ‘Stalinist spy mania was used to justify the emergence of the genre, which did not really conform to the official theory of culture, but [. . .] to the political atmosphere’ (p. 68). Colombo centres his attention on writers genuinely significant for the history of Russian spy fiction: Nikolai Shpanov, Lev Ovalov, Lev Sheinin, Aleksandr Avdeenko, Roman Kim, Iulian Semenov, Ovidii Gorchakov, Vadim Kozhevnikov, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and many others. He also extends his discussion freely beyond the period suggested in the subtitle of his book (1938–2002). His first chapter focuses on Shpanov’s once extremely popular novel The Warmongers (1949). He traces the difficulties which Shpanov encountered in publishing his novel and Stalin’s role in its publication and reception; the role of official documents and other propaganda sources, some incorporated in the structure of Shpanov’s novel; and the relationship between the spy thriller genre and conspiracy theories that flourished in the USSR. In other words, this monograph deals with all the key aspects of the spy fiction genre: aesthetic, ideological, and institutional.

After establishing the specific ‘conspiracy’ nature of the Soviet spy thriller, Colombo, in his next chapter, draws the reader’s attention to a topos which constitutes the kernel of all conspiracy and espionage narratives, namely the notion of the ‘enemy within’. To show how Soviet writers constructed and presented this nebulous villain, he traces the paths of author Lev Sheinin from ‘investigator of major cases for the office of the USSR State Procurator’ (p. 69) to literary fame, and the opposite journey of Sheinin’s no less popular namesake Lev Ovalov from [End Page 425] literature to the Gulag. At the same time, Colombo demonstrates how the perception of the hidden enemy gradually transformed from a non-proletarian individual of ‘alien’ class origin into a person with the wrong, i.e. Jewish, background.

Colombo follows the same methodology in the next section, including a chapter on the single most popular author of Soviet spy thrillers, Iulian Semenov and his famous novel Seventeen Moments of Spring (1969), which was adapted for television in 1973 by Tatʹiana Lioznova with outstanding success. He combines his presentation of individual writers with discussion of major contemporaneous ideas, slogans, and stereotypes absorbed by Russian spy fiction, offering a variety of intriguing facts and equally intriguing interpretations.

Two aspects of Colombo’s monograph perturbed me somewhat. Firstly, in his Introduction he argues rather passionately that the subject of his study is exclusively the ‘spy thriller’. I feel he should not have insisted on this point as, from a conventional point of view, he addresses various narrative genres and their hybrids: besides the spy thriller, he draws upon adventure, detective, political, and other novels. Moreover, his attempt to isolate the spy thriller as a genre is unconvincing and time-consuming. Secondly, I found the style and structure of the book a little confusing, rather like a spy thriller itself, full of unexpected changes of time and place, plot twists, and new perspectives. But these objections are minor: crucially, Colombo’s book is new, timely, and very good.