Sternean Entanglements: Laurence Sterne and Early Soviet Culture

Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy (1759-61) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), was an unlikely object of sustained interest in Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, his writings found avid readers and admirers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, across a period of profound changes in literary institutions and intellectual life. Sterne could be claimed in the 1920s as an experimental writer and “revolutionary of form”; by the 1930s, when such claims had become increasingly difficult to sustain, interest in his work intensified rather than disappeared, while the terms on which he was read change…