The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of a tradition that produced some of the most influential novels of the Western world. In newly-commissioned essays by prominent scholars, the work of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and many others is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading, and all quotations are in English. The volume will be invaluable for students, scholars and anyone interested in the Russian novel.

The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of a tradition that produced some of the most influential novels of the Western world. In newly-commissioned essays by prominent scholars, the work of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and many others is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading, and all quotations are in English. The volume will be invaluable for students, scholars and anyone interested in the Russian novel.

"The best thing ever done on how Tolstoy wrote War and Peace. Feuer shows us an incredible complexity in terms of the creative process. You see the seams and joints in the novel." Gary Saul Morson, Northwestern University"In 1963, Kathryn B. Feuer had access to the manuscripts of the drafts for the novel, almost 4,000 pages. At Tolstoy's home, she concentrated on a dozen books that related to his earlier conceptions of War and Peace. She was indefatigable, with every detail at her fingertips, and she could express fine perceptions with something of the lucidity and measure of her admired Jane...

Fyodor Dostoevsky completed his final novel-- The Brothers Karamazov--in 1880. A work of universal appeal and significance, his exploration of good and evil immediately gained an international readership and today "remains harrowingly alive in the face of our present day worries, paradoxes, and joys," observes Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller. In this engaging and original book, she guides us through the complexities of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, offering keen insights and a celebration of the author's unparalleled powers of imagination.

Miller's critical companion to...

How does Dostoevsky's fiction illuminate questions that are important to us today? What does the author have to say about memory and invention, the nature of evidence, and why we read? How did his readings of such writers as Rousseau, Maturin, and Dickens filter into his own novelistic consciousness? And what happens to a novel like Crime and Punishment when it is the subject of a classroom discussion or a conversation? In this original and wide-ranging book, Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller approaches the author's major works from a variety of angles and offers a new set of keys to...

Robert L. Belknap's theory of plot illustrates the active and passive roles literature plays in creating its own dynamic reading experience. Literary narrative enchants us through its development of plot, but plot tells its own story about the making of narrative, revealing through its structures, preoccupations, and strategies of representation critical details about how and when a work came into being.

Through a rich reading of Shakespeare's King Lear and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Belknap explores the spatial, chronological, and causal aspects of plot, its brilliant...

Robert L. Belknap's theory of plot illustrates the active and passive roles literature plays in creating its own dynamic reading experience. Literary narrative enchants us through its development of plot, but plot tells its own story about the making of narrative, revealing through its structures, preoccupations, and strategies of representation critical details about how and when a work came into being.
Through a rich reading of Shakespeare's King Lear and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Belknap explores the spatial, chronological, and causal aspects of plot, its brilliant manipulation...