This book reassesses the role of Russian Montparnasse writers in the articulation of transnational modernism generated by exile. Examining their production from a comparative perspective, it demonstrates that their response to urban modernity transcended the Russian master narrative and resonated with broader aesthetic trends in interwar Europe.

Introduction: Russian Montparnasse as a Transnational Community
PART I: NARRATING THE SELF: THE EXISTENTIAL CODE OF INTER-WAR LITERATURE
1. In the 'Waste Land' of Postwar Europe: Facing the Modern Condition
2. Who Needs Art? The Human Document and Strategies of Self-Representation
3. Human Document or Autofiction?
PART II: READING AND WRITING THE 'PARIS TEXT'
4. 'A Shared Homeland for All Foreigners': The Paris Myth.
5. An Illusory City: Denationalization and the 'Mission' of the Diaspora
6. Below and Beyond: Alternative Paris
PART III: CHALLENGES OF THE JAZZ AGE
7. Post-Traumatic Hedonism
8. Art Deco Fiction
9. Anthologizing the Jazz Age: Gaïto Gazdanov's The Spectre of Alexander Wolf
PART IV: THE CANON RE-DEFINED: READING THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS IN PARIS
10. 'A third-rate rhymer ... but a poet of genius': Lermontov and Russian Montparnasse
11. 'Backyard' Literature: Vasily Rozanov's Unlikely Posthumous Fame in Paris and Beyond
12. Dialogue with Tolstoy
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Maria Rubins teaches Russian and Comparative literature at University College London, UK. She has published extensively on Russian literature, Franco-Russian cultural relations, exile, Russian émigré literature, bilingual and transnational writing, and contemporary Francophone fiction. She is the author of Ecphrasis in Parnasse and Acmeism: Comparative Visions of Poetry and Poetics (2000), editor of reference editions and annotated volumes of Russian émigré prose, and translator into Russian of French and English authors, including Irène Némirovsky, Judith Gautier and Elizabeth Gaskell.