The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

by Caryl Emerson

• ISBN13: 9780521844697
• ISBN10: 052184469X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-07-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Russian literature arrived late on the European scene. Within several generations, its great novelists had shocked - and then conquered - the world. In this introduction to the rich and vibrant Russian tradition, Caryl Emerson weaves a narrative of recurring themes and fascinations across several centuries. Beginning with traditional Russian narratives (saints' lives, folk tales, epic and rogue narratives), the book moves through literary history chronologically and thematically, juxtaposing literary texts from each major period. Detailed attention is given to canonical writers including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, as well as to some current bestsellers from the post-Communist period. Fully accessible to students and readers with no knowledge of Russian, the volume includes a glossary and pronunciation guide of key Russian terms as well as a list of useful secondary works. The book will be of great interest to students of Russian as well as of comparative literature.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. xii
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Critical models, committed readers, and three Russian Ideas	p. 11
Literary critics and their public goods	p. 14
Three Russian Ideas	p. 22
Heroes and their plots	p. 34
Righteous persons	p. 35
Fools	p. 39
Frontiersmen	p. 43
Rogues and villains	p. 47
Society's misfits in the European style	p. 53
The heroes we might yet see	p. 57
Traditional narratives	p. 59
Saints' lives	p. 62
Folk tales (Baba Yaga, Koshchey the Deathless)	p. 66
Hybrids: folk epic and Faust tale	p. 71
Miracle, magic, law	p. 75
Western eyes on Russian realities: the eighteenth century	p. 80
Neoclassical comedy and Gallomania	p. 84
Chulkov's Martona: life instructs art	p. 90
Karamzin's "Poor Liza"	p. 94
The astonishing nineteenth century: Romanticisms	p. 99
Pushkin and honor	p. 101
Duels	p. 108
Gogol and embarrassment	p. 114
Pretendership	p. 118
Realisms: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov	p. 125
Biographies of events, and biographies that are quests for the Word	p. 129
Time-spaces (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy)	p. 134
Dostoevsky and books	p. 146
Tolstoy and doing without words	p. 148
Poets and novelists (Dostoevsky and Nekrasov)	p. 153
Anton Chekhov: lesser expectations, smaller forms	p. 156
Symbolist and Modernist world-building: three cities, three novels, and the Devil	p. 166
The fin de siècle: Solovyov, Nietzsche, Einstein, Pavlov's dogs, political terrorism	p. 168
Modernist time-spaces and their modes of disruption	p. 171
City myths: Petersburg, Moscow, OneState	p. 179
The Stalin years: socialist realism, anti-fascist fairy tales, wilderness	p. 191
What was socialist realism?	p. 198
Cement and construction (Fyodor Gladkov)	p. 203
The Dragon and destruction (Evgeny Shvarts)	p. 207
Andrei Platonov and suspension	p. 211
The "right to the lyric" in an Age of Iron	p. 217
Coming to terms and seeking new terms: from the first Thaw (1956) to the end of the millennium	p. 220
The intelligentsia and the camps (Solzhenitsyn)	p. 224
The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya)	p. 230
Three ways for writers to treat matter (Sorokin, Pelevin, Akunin)	p. 238
Notes	p. 250
Glossary	p. 269
Guide to further reading	p. 282
Index	p. 285
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