Justin Wear examines the complex relationship between authorial self-reflection and literary tradition in three of the most famous Russian novels of the first half of the twentieth century: Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift. An original reading of these novels reveals a significant shift that occurred in the Russian tradition of psychological prose in the 20th century. According to Vere, all three novelists respond in their own way to the twin crises that characterize their times: the general modernist destabilization of identity and the alienation from literary tradition that occurred after the 1917 Revolution.