Abstract
This paper examines the heritage of the Prague journal Volya Rossii, one of the leading Russian emigration's periodical publications in the 1920s, in terms of literary criticism. The journal's editorial board included members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the Eser) and was mainly noted as an exponent of the political left.
The staff of the journal observed the unfolding of the New Economic Policy with political optimism, and argued that their contemporary Russian literature was primarily thriving in Soviet Russia, but not in the exile. For this reason, this research aims to describe the main tendencies in the perception of the Soviet literature of the interwar period by the magazine's critics and columnists.
Furthermore, this paper includes thematical and theoretical preferences in publications of Mark Slonim, the chief editor of the literary section of Volya Rossii, and other key personalities from the journal's editorial staff, as well as, their polemics on émigré critics who prophesied the death of Russian literature due to the revolution of 1917.