Lidiia Seifullina, a woman writer whose meteoric rise to popularity in early Soviet literature was as dramatic as her virtual disappearance from the literary scene after the 1930s, remains an important figure in the Soviet literary culture of the 1920s. Before the arrival of such canonical works of Soviet literature as Dmitrii Andreevich Furmanov's Chapaev (1923) or Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev's Razgrom (The Nineteen, 1927), Seifullina's stories dealing with the revolutionary changes in Siberian villages and towns enjoyed extraordinary popularity. In 1922 Seifullina was the voice of the emerging Soviet literature, standing for the generation coming to terms with the cataclysmic changes in Soviet society.

The source of Seifullina's early success lies in her focus on the most troubling aspects of the new Russia and in the vibrant characters and unfamiliar settings she chooses to demonstrate the turbulent present of the Russian village. Seifullina's powerful, trenchant language, which seemed to convey with...