Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934

“Dralyuk asserts that the [red Pinkerton] experiment should not be written off as a simple curiosity of the NEP era. Arguing that parody is a means of engaging with, while separating from, an artistic progenitor, he sees the red Pinkertons as a critical stage in the evolution of socialist realism rather than as a literary dead end […] Dralyuk has presented a well-researched and entertaining analysis that redeems the red Pinkerton as an important, albeit unsuccessful, episode in Soviet cultural history.” – T. Clayton Black, Washington College (The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928, v. 7)

“Boris Dralyuk provides the first monograph in English that traces what he terms the ‘Pinkerton craze’ from its pre-history to its demise in the 1930s. […] Dralyuk has produced an engaging and revealing investigation into popular culture; the book will be of value to all those who study the literature or the history of twentieth-century Russia.” – Barry P. Scherr, Dartmouth College (Slavic and East European Journal, v. 57, no. 3)

“Western Crime Fiction Goes East is an ambitious and wide-ranging work, but an eminently readable one. […] Western Crime Fiction Goes East may not resolve this ongoing and often contentious relationship between genre and ideology, but the intriguing historical example it presents has the potential to inspire wider applications and further investigations into the subject.” – Zachary Hoskins, University of Missouri – Kansas City (The Journal of Popular Culture v. 47, no. 1)

“The history of ‘Pinkertonovshchina’ provides Dralyuk with an occasion to recreate a complete portrait of the era. … This genre, which was never accepted by official criticism, proves to be an extremely fruitful though forgotten link in the history of Soviet popular literature, and with this book the author returns it to its rightful place in the national culture.” – M. Kostianova (New Literary Observer [Russia] 126 [February 2014])