Iurii Libedinsky--writer, critic, and literary theoretician--belongs to the generation of Soviet writers who emerged in the early 1920s, immediately after the end of the Russian Civil War. Libedinsky's novella Nedelia (1923; translated as A Week, 1923) not only brought him the favor of readers and critics but also made him, at age twenty-four, the leader of a proletarian writers' mass movement. Libedinsky remained one of the most notable writers and theoreticians of proletariat literature until 1932, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party dissolved Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei (RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). Together with Leopold Leopoldovich Averbakh, Semen Abramovich Rodov, Aleksandr Serafimovich (Aleksandr Serafimovich Popov), G. Lelevich (Laborii Gilelevich Kalmanzon), Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev, Dmitri Andreevich Furmanov, and Aleksandr Il'ich Bezymensky, Libedinsky founded the literary journals Na postu (On Guard, 1923-1925), Oktiabr' (October, 1924-present), and Na literaturnom postu (On Literary Guard, 1926-1932). Libedinsky's articles in RAPP publications were...