The collection Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse represents selected proceedings from the conference, Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse: 20th Century Experience, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 2009. The Tbilisi conference pioneered scholarly inquiry into post-Soviet space, which evaluated political and cultural realia, emphasizing the challenges facing literature and culture in totalitarian strangleholds, various kinds of ideological diktat, their possible forms and consequences. The Soviet type of totalitarianism was especially accentuated.

Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, full comprehension of the process of Sovietization has become possible, and in the field of literary studies scholars have worked on a number of issues: assessing conceptual and motivational models of Soviet-period texts; demonstrating the reaction of literary discourse to intellectual terror and systematizing alternative models offered by anti-Soviet discourse; exhibiting the myths and stereotypes of the totalitarian epoch; and classifying literary genres.

The collection Soviet Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse has gathered papers by scholars from almost all of the post-Soviet states, as well as of some other countries. It is a first attempt to solve the above-mentioned issues and offers a wide array of questions.