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Acknowledgments As writing is necessarily a lonely and grueling affair, so the more I feel a debt of gratitude to those who helped me in carrying out this project. I am grateful to Boris Gasparov, a teacher and mentor, for recognizing a historian in me and for steering me away from temptations of abstract theorizing about metafiction by putting my mind to work on the challenging problem in Russian cultural history to which this book is devoted. I am especially indebted to the friendship of Andrew Wachtel: this book might never have been completed without his unflagging encouragement, his awesome efficiency and energy, of which he gave most generously, patiently fixing my nonnative English in all the three major drafts of this book. I thank Irina Paperno and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal for inviting me to participate in the scholarly forums they organized, which helped me develop some of the ideas that eventually went into this book; I also thank them for perusing the manuscript at various stages and providing incisive valuable comments. I must acknowledge the research grants from the Academic Senate of the University of California at Los Angeles that enabled me to employ the technical editorial help of able graduate students, among whom I wish to thank particularly Lisa Wakamiya, Marilyn Gray, Yuliya Morozova, and Chelsea Ray. I extend my gratitude to my daughter, Masha, for volunteering to edit the book's central chapter-the experience was rewarding for both of us, especially as it generated disputes about and insights into intricate lingUistic differences between English and Russian. Last but not least, I should like to express my deeply felt appreciation to the editors of Northwestern University Press, Susan Harris and Sue Betz, production manager Bruce Frausto, and copyeditor Jamie Fuller for their expert and meticulous craft, without which this book could not have gone to print. xi ...

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