Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Russian & Former Soviet Union

For Humanity's Sake is the first study in English to trace the genealogy of the classic Russian novel, from Pushkin to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky. Lina Steiner demonstrates how these writers' shared concern for individual and national education played a major role in forging a Russian cultural identity.

For Humanity's Sake highlights the role of the critic Apollon Grigor'ev, who was first to formulate the difference between West European and Russian conceptions of national education or Bildung -- which he attributed to Russia's special sociopolitical conditions,...

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge, Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful...

Since his death in 1837, Alexander Pushkin--often called the "father of Russian literature"--has become a timeless embodiment of Russian national identity, adopted for diverse ideological purposes and reinvented anew as a cultural icon in each historical era (tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet). His elevation to mythic status, however, has led to the celebration of some of his writings and the shunning of others. Throughout the history of Pushkin studies, certain topics, texts, and interpretations have remained officially off-limits in Russia--taboos as prevalent in today's Russia as ever...

No European Devil can claim so long or so political a connection with Russian culture as Milton's Satan. Russian poets came to know him before they heard of Dante, Marlowe, Tasso, or of the devils of the Baroque era. This may explain why Milton's influence was so intensely felt by the Russians, especially during the Romantic age. In this, the first study in any language of Milton's reception in Russia, that influence is traced to an early translation of Paradise Lostuncovered by Valentin Boss in the Moscow archives.

British radicals who professed to believe that Milton...