How the Russians Read the French

by Meyer, Priscilla

• ISBN13: 9780299229344
• ISBN10: 0299229343
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-05-27
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Russian writers of the nineteenth century were quite consciously creating a new national literary tradition. They saw themselves through Western European eyes, at once admiring Europe and feeling inferior to it. This ambivalence was most keenly felt in relation to France, whose language and culture had shaped the world of the Russian aristocracy from the time of Catherine the Great. In their novels, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy responded to the French realists by setting the French works into dialogue with Russian and biblical texts. Answering the French novels with Pushkinrs"s prose as well as with the Gospels, the Russian authors created moral and philosophical works of art based in the spiritual values they felt the French had lost. Meyer argues that each of these great Russian authors takes the French tradition as a thesis, proposes his own antithesis, and creates in his novel a synthesis meant to create a genuinely Russian national tradition, in dialogue with rather than imitative of Western models.

Author Biography

Priscilla Meyer is professor of Russian at Wesleyan University and author of Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

Priscilla Meyer is professor of Russian at Wesleyan University and author of Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.