This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy’s broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular culture. Her work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialist impulses and rhetoric in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement. In addition to some of Nepomnyashchy’s best previously published scholarly work, this volume includes excerpts from The Politics of Tradition: Rerooting Russian Literature After Stalin, the book manuscript that Nepomnyashchy was working on in the last years of her life.