The Cambridge introduction to Russian literature

Description

Critical models, committed readers, and three Russian ideas. Literary critics and their public goods Three Russian Ideas -- Heroes and their plots. Righteous persons Fools Frontiersmen Rogues and villains Society's misfits in the European style The heroes we might yet see -- Traditional narratives. Saints' lives Folk tales (Baba Yaga, Koshchey the Deathless) Hybrids : folk epic and Faust tale Miracle, magic, law -- Western eyes on Russian realities : the eighteenth century. Neoclassical comedy and Gallomania Chulkov's Martona : life instructs art Karamzin's "Poor Liza" -- The astonishing nineteenth century : romanticisms. Pushkin and honor Duels Gogol and embarrassment Pretendership -- Realisms : Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. Biographies of events, and biographies that are quests for the Word Time-spaces (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy) Dostoevsky and books Tolstoy and doing without words Poets and novelists (Dostoevsky and Nekrasov) Anton Chekhov : lesser expectations, smaller forms -- Symbolist and modernist world-building : three cities, three novels, and the devil. The fin de siècle : Solovyov, Nietzsche, Einstein, Pavlov's dogs, political terrorism Modernist time-spaces and their modes of disruption City myths : Petersburg, Moscow, OneState -- The Stalin years : socialist realism, anti-fascist fairy tales, wilderness. What was socialist realism? Cement and construction (Fyodor Gladkov) The Dragon and destruction (Evgeny Shvarts) Andrei Platonov and suspension The "right to the lyric" in an Age of Iron -- Coming to terms and seeking new terms : from the first Thaw (1956) to the end of the millennium. The intelligentsia and the camps (Solzhenitsyn) The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya) Three ways for writers to treat matter (Sorokin, Pelevin, Akunin) -- Glossary.