Robert Louis Jackson has long been recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the foremost Dostoevsky scholars in the world. "Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature" collects twenty essays by distinguished scholars (many former students of Jackson's) and admiring colleagues on some of the foremost questions in Russian studies. Whatever the specific topic, these essays manifest a determination to exercise the critical independence and integrity exemplified by Jackson throughout his long career.

What does it mean to read one nation's literature in another language? The considerable popularity of Russian literature in the English-speaking world rests almost entirely upon translations: the many competing versions of major works, and the continuing publication of new and revised translations, suggest the inherently complex interplay between language and literature. In The Translator of the Text Rachel May analyzes Russian literature in English translation, treating it less as a substitute for the original works than as a special subset of English literature, with its own cultural,...

A Plot of Her Own presents compelling new readings of major texts in the Russian literary canon, all of which are readily available in translation. The female protagonists in the works examined are inextricably linked with the fundamental issues raised by the novels they inform; the interpretations offered strive not to be reductive or doctrinaire, not to be imposed from the outside but to arise from the texts themselves and the historical circumstances in which they were written. Authors discussed include Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov, and the novels considered range from...

Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon, philosopher, journalist, and scholar, was one of the most original and eccentric Pushkinists of Russia's Silver Age. His eclectic critical judgment was highly esteemed by his generation's best poets and critics, and many of his idiosyncratic interpretations of Pushkin have become canonical. Brian Horowitz's detailed study illuminates both Pushkin's position as a cultural icon of the Silver Age and Gershenzon's role in establishing and challenging that reputation. As Gershenzon's work mirrors both significant and hidden aspects of the Pushkin scholarship of his...

This text presents a detailed study of birding in 19th-century Russia. It is a guide to the bird species of Russia, combining a naturalist's sensibility with literary skills, looking at behaviour, life-cycles and lyrical discourses on habitats that comprise the Russian Steppe.

"Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture" is an innovative study of the Virgin Mary and the "saintly harlots"--Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene--as a cultural paradigm encoded in Chekhov's prose. De Sherbinin establishes the authority of the Marian paradigm in nineteenth-century Russian culture with a comprehensive overview of salient religious and literary texts, then offers critical readings of more than fifteen Chekhov stories, including key works such as "Peasants," "Peasant Women," and "My Life." De Sherbinin argues that Chekhov inverts and displaces the Christian meanings of Marian texts...

Fedor Aleksandrovich Abramov (1920-83) was one of the leading representatives of the Russian village prose movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In "The Life and Work of Fedor Abramov, " scholars from the United States and abroad draw on Abramov's works, his diaries, and his private writings as sources for examining his place within the village prose movement and within Anglo-American theories of cultural reception.

A poet, critic and theoretician at the turn of the 20th century, Viacheslav Ivanov was dubbed Viacheslav the Magnificent by his contemporaries. This volume of essays covers a broad range of Ivanov's interests including the aesthetics of Symbolism, theatre and culturological concerns.

Although Russia's major Golden Age writers have had numerous book-length studies devoted to them by distinguished American slavists, no Western collection of essays has examined in comprehensive yet rigorous fashion the many literary pathways by which Russians imagined and revised their modern identity as a people. In this collection of important new essays, poetic works by Derzhavin, Krylov, Batiushkov, Pushkin, Girboedov, Lermontov, and, in a novel interaction, Baratynsky and Russia's first woman poet, Pavlova, are resituated within the force fields of contradictory cultural pressures, as...

A.F. Veltman (1800-1870), a prolific but largely forgotten nineteenth-century Russian writer, played a significant role in the development of Russian literature. Once of the most popular prose writers in Russia in the 1830s and 1840s, his work influenced Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and many others. The five stories in this collection will give the non-Russian reader a brief but representative sampling of Veltman's considerable literary output.