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

For all his distance from formal philosophy, Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the most philosophical of writers. In works from fictional masterpieces to little-known nonfiction prose, he grappled with the ultimate questions about the nature of humankind. His novels are peopled by characters who dramatize the fierce debates that preoccupied the Russian intelligentsia during the second half of the nineteenth century. What was the philosophy of Dostoevsky? How does reading this literary giant from a new perspective add to our understanding of him and of Russian culture?

In this remarkable book,...

"Aspiring thinkers require a stage for their performance and an audience to help give their actions distinction and meaning. To be made durable and influential, their charismatic stories have to be framed by supporting ideals, practices, and institutions. Although the biographies of the Empire's most famous thinkers have a comfortable platform in modern Russia's printed record, scholars have yet to explore fully the intimate context surrounding their activities in the early nineteenth century. There is, as a result, a certain homeless quality to our understandings of Imperial Russian...

"It evoked almost unprecedented discussions, like those at the time of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Some praised the novel far more than it deserved, others complained bitterly that it was a defamation of youth. I may, however, without exaggeration assert that no one in Russia took the trouble to fathom the ideas of the novel. The eulogies and condemnations are equally one-sided." Thus did Mikhail Artsybashev (1878 1927), whose novels and short stories are suffused with themes of sex, suicide, and murder, describe the reaction to publication in 1907 of Sanin, his second novel. The...

"No work in modern literature, with the possible exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin, can compete with What Is to Be Done? in its effect on human lives and its power to make history. For Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution." Joseph Frank, The Southern Review

Almost from the moment of its publication in 1863, Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done?, had a profound impact on the course of Russian literature and politics. The idealized...

Osip Mandel'shtam (1891-1938) is considered by many to have been the best Russian poet of his era, and he also wrote a number of critical essays, often considered to be almost impenetrable. Elena Glazov-Corrigan analyses Mandel'shtam's thoughts on poetry and art in the context of the major postmodern literary debates and traces their development throughout his writings. This is the first attempt to describe in a comprehensive way Mandel'shtam's intellectual world and its effect on his evolution as a thinker, specifically, on differences in his attitude towards language.

Of...