In the routine absence of democratic pluralism, Russian intellectual life has always depended on "journals" (when, that is, such life wasn't censored altogether). Journals have not only traced current events; they have been literary and cultural monuments. Major literary works have been reviewed in journals, after having been first serialized in them; government response to culture has been recorded there as well.

First published in 1968, Robert A. Maguire's classic work Red Virgin Soil is a richly detailed study of a journal by the same name that was the most significant Soviet literary journal of the 1920s. The journal published belles lettres, theory, and criticism and represented the first serious attempt in nearly half a century to create and shape an entire generation of writers, readers, and critics through the energy and authority of such a form.

Maguire's work is also a comprehensive survey of Soviet literary culture in that critical period between the end of the Civil War and the onslaught of the Stalin revolution, a period when writers were still able to engage in public debate about literature's role in the building of a revolutionary culture. Red Virgin Soil is an invaluable book.