In attempting to identify and define the revolutionary novel in Russian literature, the present study has striven to differentiate it from such phenomena as the anti-nihilist novel, the Populist novel, the intelligentsia novel, the post-revolutionary Soviet novel of reconstruction, the Five-Year-Plan novel and other types of novel in Soviet literature that are concerned to describe the creation of a socialist society. For this reason such famous novels with obvious political content as Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, Turgenev's Virgin Soil, Gladkov's Cement or Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned have been omitted in favour of novels, equally political in content, that have attempted to explore more directly the revolutionary pressures in Russian society and the complexities of revolutionary experience in the wake of revolution and civil war. Simultaneously this study has hoped to show how the revolutionary novel as a genre revolutionised itself in response to revolutionary change while always asserting its literary independence. It has acquired as a result a freedom that has since made it the cornerstone of dissident literature in the Soviet Union.

Another important purpose of this study has been to demonstrate the richness of the novelistic heritage in Russian and Soviet literature. It has sought to draw attention to little-known novels or, in certain cases, novels that have received no attention in Western critical studies and little more than passing mention in Soviet works of literary criticism.