Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak examines the origin of the nineteen- century Russian novel and challenges the Lukacs-Bakhtin theory of epic. By removing the Russian novel from its European context, the authors reveal that it developed as a means of reconnecting the narrative form with its origins in classical and Christian epic in a way that expressed the Russian desire to renew and restore ancient spirituality. Through this methodology, Griffiths and Rabinowitz dispute Bakhtin's classification of epic as a monophonic and dead genre whose time has passed. Due to its grand...