The Concise Literary Encyclopedia () was a Soviet encyclopedia of literature published in nine volumes between 1962 and 1978. The main 8 volumes were published in 1962âÂÂ1975, the additional 9th volume in 1978. In the encyclopaedia more than 12 thousand author articles (personalities of writers, reviews of periods, characteristics of literary terms, trends, literary groups, literary criticism and the press, etc.); The alphabetical index contains about 35,000 names, titles and terms. Edition - 100 000 copies.
The editor-in-chief of the USSR SS was Alexey Surkov; in fact, the publication was managed by deputy editor-in-chief Vladimir Zhdanov, and since 1969, by A.F. Yermakov.
Russian scholar John Glad wrote, "For the specialist in Russian literature, this is undoubtedly the most basic an important reference tool to appear from the Soviet Union. Scholars Barry Lewis and Michael Ulman wrote, "despite its shortcomings, must be considered an achievement comparable to the best Western productions of its type."
The preface to the first volume says that the encyclopaedia is called brief encyclopaedia since âÂÂit is not an exhaustive body of literary knowledgeâ and that the creation of a fundamental literary encyclopaedia is âÂÂa matter of the futureâÂÂ, but the more complete literary encyclopaedia has not been subsequently published.
In general, it is a âÂÂcarefully prepared and highly professional publication.âÂÂ
The ninth volume was famous for the fact that it included articles about writers originally excluded from the glossary by ideological reasons, first of all about representatives of unrealistic trends in Soviet literature (Konstantin Vaginov, Alexander Vvedensky) and the first emigration (Georgy Adamovich, Don-Aminado, Nikolai Evreinov).
The subject heading does not contain the names of the emigrants of the 1970s, even those to whom the separate articles in the previous volumes of the encyclopaedia are devoted (Alexander Galich, Vladimir Maksimov, Viktor Nekrasov).