Valentin Kataev, a highly prominent Soviet writer, wrote fiction, plays, autobiographical essays, and poetry. He was founding editor of the journal Iunost' (Youth) in 1955 and served as its editor in chief until 1962. Kataev enjoyed a successful career, receiving the Stalin Prize and becoming a member of the Executive Board of the Union of Soviet Writers. Despite his political conformism, Kataev's prose developed the most experimental features of Russian modernism and avant-garde culture, producing a strange hybrid of genres making way for his subjective worldview. He was indebted to both Ivan Alekseevich Bunin and Vladimir Vladimirovich Maiakovsky. Links with socialist realism are evident in some works only in terms of subject matter--when, for example, Kataev describes Vladimir Lenin, Maksim Gor'ky, or industrial and military achievements in the Soviet Union. Yet, his lyrical style, fragmented structures, and subjective presentation reveal deeper links with the Russian modernist tradition. Many critics define...