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New scholarly and critical work on Russian and Soviet literature and culture.

  • General Editors: Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford
  • Editorial Boards: Anthony Cross, Caryl Emerson, Barbara Heldt, Malcolm Jones, Donald Rayfield, G. S. Smith, Victor Terras

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22 results in Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature

Page 1 of 2

Nabokov's Early Fiction
  • Patterns of Self and Other
  • Julian W. Connolly
  • Published online:
    05 December 2011
    Print publication:
    20 August 1992
  • This book traces the evolution of Vladimir Nabokov's prose fiction from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. While individual works by Nabokov have attracted extensive commentary, the precise contours of Nabokov's development as a writer of fiction have received little attention. Julian Connolly traces this development by focusing on a crucial subject: the relationship between self and other in its various forms (including character to character, character to author, author to reader). At the core of Professor Connolly's analysis is the discovery of a powerful structure of bifurcation in Nabokov's work, between the character dimensions of a protagonist's identity and its latent authorial dimensions. As Nabokov's works grow more sophisticated, the author manipulates the relationship between these two dimensions, creating a series of memorable characters who seek to attain the status of authentic author by shedding that aspect of the self which functions as a character. Julian Connolly's investigation into the relationship between self and other in the early fiction provides an original model for approaching all of Nabokov's fictional writing, and constitutes a major contribution to Nabokov scholarship.

The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory
  • Diane Oenning Thompson
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    28 June 1991
  • The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky's last and most complex novel. It represents the fullest expression of his quest to achieve a literary work which would express the dilemmas and aspirations of his time and also represent the eternal, absolute values he perceived in the Christian tradition. Diane Thompson's study focuses on the meaning and poetic function of memory in the novel, and seeks to show how Dostoevsky used cultural memory to create a synthesis between his Christian ideal and art. Memory is considered not only as a theme or subject, but also as a principle of artistic composition. This interpretation identifies those aspects of cultural memory Dostoevsky incorporated into his novel, and analyses how he used them as significant components of his characters' memories. This challenging study sets Dostoevsky's work in a new perspective. It will appeal to scholars of Russian and comparative literature.

Nikolay Novikov
  • Enlightener of Russia
  • W. Gareth Jones
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    14 June 1984
  • Nikolay Novikov (1744–1818) was a key figure in Russian cultural life under Catherine the Great. He was in turn a successful journalist, historiographer, educator, publisher, leading freemason and philanthropist and he left his distinctive mark on each of these spheres at a formative moment in Russia. This book is a Western study of Novikov's complete career and it shows how he responded to Catherine's enlightened despotism in cultural matters and why their ways eventually parted. Novikov is viewed here not only as a founding father of the Russian intelligentsia, but as a representative of the general European Enlightenment, who discovered and encouraged a new generation of writers. A knowledge of Novikov and the kind of enlightenment he strove to spread in Russia is important for an understanding of the particular cast of mind evident in Russian thought and writings in the nineteenth century. The book will therefore be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students of Russian literature and intellectual history.

Bulgakov's Last Decade
  • The Writer as Hero
  • J. A. E. Curtis
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    24 April 1987
  • Published in 1987, this book was the first full-length interpretative study in English of the later writings of the outstanding Soviet novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). The focus is the 1930s, the period when Bulgakov was writing The Master and Margarita, an extraordinary novel that has had a profound impact in the Soviet Union and which is now generally regarded as his masterpiece. Using material from Soviet archives and libraries, Dr Curtis suggests that Bulgakov's fundamental preoccupation in this movel with the destiny of literature and of the writer is reflected in other major works of the same period, in particular his writings on Pushkin and Molière. Bulgakov emerges as a belated romantic, a figure unique on the early Soviet literacy scene.

Audrey Bely
  • A Critical Study of the Novels
  • J. D. Elsworth
  • Published online:
    07 October 2011
    Print publication:
    15 September 1983
  • Audrey Bely was one of the most innovative prose writers in Russian in the twentieth century. This book traces the development of his technique as a novelist from the early experimental Symphonies (1902–8) to the last novel, Masks, published in 1932. In the first two chapters of the book, Dr Elsworth explores Bely's theoretical writings on the aesthetic theory of Symbolism, and his association, after 1912, with the doctrines of Rudolf Steiner. Bely regarded art as an active force for the transformation of the human personality and the resolution of the crisis that he diagnosed in the culture of his time. Both the subject matter and the stylistic peculiarities of his novels have their origin in this particular philosophy of culture, and it is in this context that the novels are examined in the second half of the book. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in Bely and the wider subject of Russian Symbolist doctrine and practice.

The Russian Revolutionary Novel
  • Turgenev to Pasternak
  • Richard Freeborn
  • Published online:
    04 April 2011
    Print publication:
    27 January 1983
  • Professor Freeborn's book is an attempt to identify and define the evolution of a particular kind of novel in Russian and Soviet literature: the revolutionary novel. This genre is a uniquely Russian phenomenon and one that is of central importance in Russian literature. The study begins with a consideration of Turgenev's masterpiece Fathers and Children and traces the evolution of the revolutionary novel through to its most important development a century later in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the emergence of a dissident literature in the Soviet Union. Professor Freeborn examines the particular phases of the genre's development, and in particular the development after 1917: the early fiction which explored the relationship between revolution and instinct, such as Pil'nyak's The Naked Year; the first attempts at mythmaking in Leonov's The Badgers and Furmanov's Chapayev; the next phase, in which novelists turned to the investigation of ideas, exemplified most notably by Zamyatin's We; the resumption of the classical approach in such works as Olesha's Envy, which explore the interaction between the individual and society. and finally the appearance of the revolutionary epic in Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin, Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don, and Alexey Tolstoy's The Road to Calvary. Professor Freeborn also examines the way this kind of novel has undergone change in response to revolutionary change; and he shows how an important feature of this process has been the implicit assumption that the revolutionary novel is distinguished by its right to pass an objective, independent judgement on revolution and the revolutionary image of man. This is a comprehensive and challenging study of a uniquely Russian tradition of writing, which draws on a great range of novels, many of them little-known in the West. As with other titles in this series all quotations have been translated.

Portraits of Early Russian Liberals
  • A Study of the Thought of T. N. Granovsky, V. P. Botkin, P. V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin, and K. D. Kavelin
  • Derek Offord
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    22 August 1985
  • This book studies the work of five Russian liberal thinkers who were active in the period 1840–60 against the general background of Russian history, literature and thought in that period. All five thinkers (to each of whom a separate chapter is devoted) played an important part in the flowering of Russian letters in the 1840s, and were involved in the attempt of the intelligentsia, the conscience of the nation, to bring more humane and enlightened values to their backward and semi-feudal country. By the 1850s, when a more radical wing began to emerge in the intelligentsia, the moderation of these liberals became more apparent. While the radicals were prepared to countenance revolutionary upheaval, the liberals counselled patience, toleration, and gradualism. In his conclusion Dr Offord explores the possible reasons for the failure of the liberal tendency, represented by these thinkers, to establish itself properly in Russia.

The Poetic Imagination of Vyacheslav Ivanov
  • A Russian Symbolist's Perception of Dante
  • Pamela Davidson
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    18 May 1989
  • Vyacheslav Ivanov, poet, philosopher and critic, played a key role in the formation of the early twentieth-century Russian literature as leader of the religious branch of the Symbolist movement and his influence spread to Europe after his emigration to Italy in 1924. Pamela Davidson explores Ivanov's poetic method, relating his art to his central beliefs (in particular his interpretation of the ancient Greek religion of Dionysus and of the teachings of Vladimir Solovyov) and considering the ways in which he attempted to embody these ideas in his own life. She focuses on Ivanov's interpretation of Dante and in so doing, opens up fresh perspectives on the wider question of Russia's relation to the Western cultural tradition and Catholicism. Detailed analyses of Ivanov's pre-revolutionary poetry and of his translations from Dante form the basis of the second part of the study and extensive use is made of unpublished archival materials from the Soviet Union and Italy.

Gender and Russian Literature
  • New Perspectives
  • Adaptation by Rosalind Marsh
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    28 March 1996
  • Originally published in 1996, this collection of fascinating essays by leading western and Russian specialists gives an overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, between 1600 and the present. This volume contributes to the contemporary feminist project of rediscovering many hitherto unjustly neglected Russian women writers and sheds further light on the literary construction of women's identity by Russian men. It combines a study of the history and biography of women writers with close readings of literary texts, and explores certain controversial issues in Russian women's literary studies such as whether there is a separate women's literary tradition in Russia, whether the treatment of the woman question by Russian male writers reflected women's interests and experience, and whether a feminist reinterpretation of Russian women's literature is possible or even desirable.

Literary Journals in Imperial Russia
  • Edited by Deborah A. Martinsen
  • Published online:
    11 March 2010
    Print publication:
    08 January 1998
  • Given the restrictions on political action and even political discussion in Russia, Russian literary journals have served as the principal means by which Russia discovered, defined and shaped itself. Every issue of importance for literate Russians - social, economic, literary - made its appearance in one way or another on the pages of these journals, and virtually every major Russian novel of the nineteenth century was first published there in serial form. Literary Journals in Imperial Russia - a collection of essays by leading scholars, originally published in 1998 - was the first work to examine the extraordinary history of these journals in imperial Russia. The major social forces and issues that shaped literary journals during the period are analysed, detailed accounts are provided of individual journals and journalists, and descriptions are offered of the factors that contributed to their success.

Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation
  • Jacques Catteau
  • Translated by Audrey Littlewood
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    11 May 1989
  • Jacques Catteau's much-acclaimed book on Dostoyevsky, which has already received three literary prizes (and one medical) in France, appears here in English for the first time. It is an original and detailed attempt to re-examine Dostoyevsky the artist, tracing the creative process from its beginnings in the notebooks to its expression in the novels, and at the same time analysing the structures of time and space, the role of colour, and other important features of the texts. For this edition the author has taken the opportunity to revise his text and bring the bibliography up to date, where possible giving references to the Soviet Academy of Sciences' edition of Dostoyeysky's works and to English versions of critical sources.

Nabokov and his Fiction
  • New Perspectives
  • Edited by Julian W. Connolly
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    05 August 1999
  • Published in 1999 to mark the centenary of Vladimir Nabokov's birth, this volume brings together the work of eleven of the world's foremost Nabokov scholars offering perspectives on the writer and his fiction. Their essays cover a broad range of topics and approaches, from close readings of major texts, including Speak, Memory and Pale Fire, to penetrating discussions of the significant relationship between Nabokov's personal beliefs and experiences and his art. Several of the essays attempt to uncover the artistic principles that underlie the author's literary creations, while others seek to place Nabokov's work in a variety of literary and cultural contexts. Among these essays are a first glimpse at a little-known work, The Tragedy of Mr Morn, as well as a perspective on Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita. The volume as a whole offers valuable insight into Nabokov scholarship.

Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition
  • Edited by George Pattison, Diane Oenning Thompson
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    06 September 2001
  • Dostoevsky is one of Russia's greatest novelists and a major influence in modern debates about religion, both in Russia and the West. This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in his work. The aim of this collection is not to abstract Dostoevsky's religious 'teaching' from his literary works, but to explore the interaction between his Christian faith and his writing. The essays cover such topics as temptation, grace and law, Dostoevsky's use of the gospels and hagiography, Trinitarianism, and the Russian tradition of the veneration of icons, as well as reading aloud, and dialogism. In addition to an exploration of the impact of the Christian tradition on Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, there are also discussions of lesser-known works such as The Landlady and A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree.

Russian Modernism
  • The Transfiguration of the Everyday
  • Stephen C. Hutchings
  • Published online:
    28 October 2009
    Print publication:
    11 December 1997
  • This book explores the unique way in which Russian culture constructs the notion of everyday life, or byt, and offers the first unified reading of Silver-age narrative which it repositions at the centre of Russian modernism. Drawing on semiotics and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two traditions, one reflected in western representational aesthetics for which daily existence figures as neutral and normative, the other encapsulated in the Orthodox emphasis on iconic embodiment. Hutchings identifies early 'Decadent' formulations of byt as a milestone after which writers from Chekhov to Rozanov sought to affirm the iconic potential hidden in Russian realism's critique of representationalism. Provocative, yet careful, textual analyses reveal a consistent urge to redefine art's function as one not of representing life, but of transfiguring the everyday.

Russian Literature and Empire
  • Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy
  • Susan Layton
  • Published online:
    22 October 2009
    Print publication:
    26 January 1995
  • This is the first book to provide a synthesising study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of empire-building. From Pushkin's ambivalent portrayal of an alpine Circassia to Tolstoy's condemnation of tsarist aggression against Muslim tribes in Hadji Murat, the literary analysis is firmly set in its historical context, and the responses of the Russian readership too receive extensive attention. As well as exploring literature as such, this study introduces material from travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the utterances of tsarist officials and military commanders. While showing how literature often underwrote imperialism, the book carefully explores the tensions between the Russian state's ideology of a European mission to civilise the Muslim mountaineers, and romantic perceptions of those tribes as noble primitives whose extermination was no cause for celebration. By dealing with imperialism in Georgia as well, the study shows how the varied treatment of the Caucasus in literature helped Russians construct a satisfying identity for themselves as a semi-European, semi-Asian people.

Christianity in Bakhtin
  • God and the Exiled Author
  • Ruth Coates
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 February 1999
  • The work of the great Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has been examined from a wide variety of literary and theoretical perspectives. None of the many studies of Bakhtin begins to do justice, however, to the Christian dimension of his work. Christianity in Bakhtin for the first time fills this important gap. Having established the strong presence of a Christian framework in his early philosophical essays, Ruth Coates explores the way in which Christian motifs, though suppressed, continue to find expression in the work of Bakhtin's period of exile, and re-emerge in texts written during the time of his rehabilitation. Particular attention is paid to the themes of Creation, Fall, Incarnation and Christian love operating within metaphors of silence and exile, concepts which inform Bakhtin's world view as profoundly as they influence his biography.

From the Idyll to the Novel
  • Karamzin's Sentimentalist Prose
  • Gitta Hammarberg
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 June 1991
  • Karamzin was the foremost Russian representative of the late eighteenth-century Sentimentalist movement. In this study, Gitta Hammarberg makes use of advances in literary theory (especially those based on the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov) in order to develop a theory of Sentimentalist literature, which she applies to Karamzin's prose fiction. Professor Hammarberg situates Sentimentalism in its historical context, as a reflection of contemporary shifts in world view, a reaction against the neo classicist view of literature, and a vehicle for legitimizing prose fiction. She stresses the importance of the role of the author-reader in the structure of Sentimentalist texts, and relates this to the style and genres of these works. Through close readings of a representative selection of Karamzin's prose fiction, including works previously disregarded as trivial or frivolous, she shows the range of Sentimentalist fiction, its place in literary evolution, and ways in which it anticipates the Romantic movement and the modern Russian novel.

Velimir Khlebnikov
  • A Critical Study
  • Raymond Cooke
  • Published online:
    12 September 2009
    Print publication:
    03 September 1987
  • Khlebnikov is becoming recognized as one of the major Russian poets of the twentieth century, having for years been dismissed as a purveyor of unintelligible verbal trickery. This book provides a broad survey of his work. Dr Cooke's aim is to be both informative and interpretative by mapping out the contours of Khlebnikov's still largely uncharted poetic world. He highlights the complex relations between the poet and his public, draws attention to Khlebnikov's preoccupation with the meaning as well as the poetry of language, points to the significance of images of war and conflict in his work, and shows how the figure of the poet-warrior can metamorphose into the poet-prophet. There is also an examination of the vexed problem of Khlebnikov's attitudes towards his manuscripts and his concept of the book.

Contemporary Russian Satire
  • A Genre Study
  • Karen L. Ryan-Hayes
  • Published online:
    10 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 January 1996
  • This wide-ranging 1996 study presents an examination of the extraordinary diversity and range of satirical writing in Russian literature and will be of interest not only to Slavicists but also to those interested in genre theory. Through the close analysis of seminal satirical texts written by five Russian and émigré authors in the 1970s and 1980s, Karen Ryan-Hayes demonstrates that formal and thematic parody is pervasive and that it provides additional levels of meaning in contemporary Russian satire. Each work under examination is placed within the wider European literary context as well as within the Russian tradition and is representative of a different sub-genre of satire. The author focuses on a variety of these genres and modes and offers practical criticism on each text. The writers under discussion have enjoyed a positive reception in the West and their works demonstrate the variety and vitality of Russian and Soviet satire.

The Last Soviet Avant-Garde
  • OBERIU - Fact, Fiction, Metafiction
  • Graham Roberts
  • Published online:
    02 September 2009
    Print publication:
    05 June 1997
  • This is a comprehensive study of a group of avant-garde Soviet writers active in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s who styled themselves OBERIU, 'The Association for Real Art'. Graham Roberts re-examines commonly held assumptions about OBERIU, its identity as a group, its aesthetics and its place within the Russian and European literary traditions. He focuses on the prose and drama of group members Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedensky, and Konstantin Vaginov; he also considers work by Nikolay Zabolotsky and Igor Bakhterev, as well as the group's most important 'fellow-traveller', Nikolay Oleinikov. He places OBERIU in the context of the aesthetic theories of the Russian formalists and the Bakhtin circle. Roberts concludes by showing how the self-conscious literature of OBERIU - its metafiction - occupies an important transitional space between modernism and postmodernism.

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