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In the 1930s the 'canonization' of selected foreign writers formed an important part of official policies towards translated literature. The term 'canonization' refers here to the process of transorming a writer into an exemplar for others to emulate. The article analyses ways in which several Western authors (Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, and André Gide) were canonized in the Soviet Union and what the role of the Party state and official criticism (ofitsial'naia kritika) was in this process. The article pays particular attention to the benefits and drawbacks of the 'canonization' from the point of view of the Party state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how Vadim Andreev (1902-1976) promoted the posthumous literature of his father, Russian author Leonid Andreev (1871-1919), through his autobiographical writings and other marketing methods. He published “A Tale about Father” while part of the Russian émigré community in Paris, France in 1938, and later published "Childhood in the Soviet Union" in 1963 and 1968 while in the Soviet Union. Other topics considered include cultural relationships, marketing strategies, symbolic capital, and the politics of literature and Russian literary canon in the Soviet Union.

The article features the scheme of library classification applied to standard catalogs and printed cards for public libraries in Moscow, U.S.S.R. Two important facts about the classification scheme are excluded from the title page such as the version of the Dewey Decimal Classification and that the scheme is in a direct line of succession to the L. N. Tropovskii abridgment of Dewey. In spite that it is widely used for the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin literature to the Soviet Union, it is still a fact that the scheme is based on Dewey which was also admitted by Tropovskii in his introduction. The two important changes in Tropovskii's short schedule are the use of special devices for giving primacy to the classics of communism and books on the USSR and people's republics.