NIETZSCHE • Michael Tanner
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew THE NORMAN CONQUEST • George Garnett NORTHERN IRELAND • Marc Mulholland NOTHING • Frank Close
NUCLEAR WEAPONS • Joseph M. Siracusa THE OLD TESTAMENT • Michael D. Coogan PARTICLE PHYSICS • Frank Close PAUL • E. P. Sanders
PENTECOSTALISM • William K. Kay PHILOSOPHY • Edward Craig
PHILOSOPHY OF LAW • Raymond Wacks PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE • Samir Okasha PHOTOGRAPHY • Steve Edwards
PLANETS • David A. Rothery
PLATO • Julia Annas
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY • David Miller POLITICS • Kenneth Minogue
POSTCOLONIALISM • Robert Young POSTMODERNISM • Christopher Butler POSTSTRUCTURALISM • Catherine Belsey PREHISTORY • Chris Gosden
PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY • Catherine Osborne PRIVACY • Raymond Wacks
PROGRESSIVISM • Walter Nugent
PSYCHIATRY • Tom Burns
PSYCHOLOGY • Gillian Butler and Freda McManus PURITANISM • Francis J. Bremer THE QUAKERS • Pink Dandelion
QUANTUM THEORY • John Polkinghorne RACISM • Ali Rattansi
THE REAGAN REVOLUTION • Gil Troy THE REFORMATION • Peter Marshall RELATIVITY • Russell Stannard
RELIGION IN AMERICA • Timothy Beal THE RENAISSANCE • Jerry Brotton RENAISSANCE ART • Geraldine A. Johnson ROMAN BRITAIN • Peter Salway
THE ROMAN EMPIRE • Christopher Kelly ROMANTICISM • Michael Ferber
ROUSSEAU • Robert Wokler
RUSSELL • A. C. Grayling
RUSSIAN LITERATURE • Catriona Kelly THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION • S. A. Smith SCHIZOPHRENIA • Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone SCHOPENHAUER • Christopher Janaway SCIENCE AND RELIGION • Thomas Dixon SCOTLAND • Rab Houston
SEXUALITY • Véronique Mottier
SHAKESPEARE • Germaine Greer
SIKHISM • Eleanor Nesbitt
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY • John Monaghan and Peter Just SOCIALISM • Michael Newman
SOCIOLOGY • Steve Bruce
SOCRATES • C. C. W. Taylor
THE SOVIET UNION • Stephen Lovell THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR • Helen Graham SPANISH LITERATURE • Jo Labanyi SPINOZA • Roger Scruton
STATISTICS • David J. Hand
STUART BRITAIN • John Morrill
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY • Stephen Blundell TERRORISM • Charles Townshend
THEOLOGY • David F. Ford
THOMAS AQUINAS • Fergus Kerr
TOCQUEVILLE • Harvey C. Mansfield TRAGEDY • Adrian Poole
THE TUDORS • John Guy
TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Kenneth O. Morgan THE UNITED NATIONS • Jussi M. Hanhimäki THE U.S. CONCRESS • Donald A. Ritchie UTOPIANISM • Lyman Tower Sargent THE VIKINGS • Julian Richards
WITCHCRAFT • Malcolm Gaskill
WITTGENSTEIN • A. C. Grayling
WORLD MUSIC • Philip Bohlman
THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION • Amrita Narlikar WRITING AND SCRIPT • Andrew Robinson AVAILABLE SOON: LATE ANTIQUITY • Gillian Clark MUHAMMAD • Jonathan A. Brown
GENIUS • Andrew Robinson
NUMBERS • Peter M. Higgins
ORGANIZATIONS • Mary Jo Hatch
VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS
VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide.
The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. The VSI Library now contains over 200 volumes-a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology-and will continue to grow to a library of around 300 titles.
VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS AVAILABLE NOW
For more information visit our web site
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Catriona Kelly
RUSSIAN LITERATURE
A Very Short Introduction
Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction ‘a great pleasure to read. It is a sophisticated, erudite, searching, and
subtle piece of work. It is written in a lively and stimulating manner, and
displays a range to which few of Dr Kelly’s peers in the field of Russian
scholarship can aspire.’
Phil Cavendish, School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University of London ‘a brilliant essay, written with elegance, informed, incisive,
provocative … you may love it, perhaps loathe it, or feel perplexed,
but not remain indifferent.’
A. G. Cross, Cambridge University ‘Kelly’s brief but clear and effective study [is] a skilful blending of
literary personalities rather than leaning simply on chronology … it is
an original book, well done and documented, and extremely readable.’
John Bayley, St Catherine’s College, Oxford University
Preface
Introductions to Russian literature, like introductions to national literatures more generally, traditionally take three forms. One type is an outine of what is known as the ‘canon’, the lives and works of famous writers – Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, with a supporting cast of lesser figures from the nineteenth century, and of major ones from the twentieth. A second type is a sketch of literary movements and cultural institutions: Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism, Modernism, Socialist Realism; censorship, the Soviet Writers’ Union, and literary dissidence. A third way of approaching the exercise, one preferred by writers as opposed to academics, is personal appreciation. In, say, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature, or Joseph Brodsky’s Less than One, the selection of material is explicitly subjective, and vehement advocacy of some writers sits alongside equally energetic debunking of others.
There are also less obvious ways of writing introductions. One is the survey organized round a strong central thesis. Yury Tynyanov’s brilliant book Archaists and Innovators (1929), for instance, argued that literary evolution developed out of writers’ attitudes towards existing texts, whose ways of representing the world might be inertly copied, actively rejected, or at once absorbed and transformed. Another is the in-depth analysis of some technical aspect of the literary language. Mikhail Gasparov’s history of Russian versification, for example, examines how preferences for metrical forms have changed over the course of time and scrutinizes the weight of meaning carried by particular metrical measures at a given point in history.
This book does not fall into any of these categories, least of all the first two. There are many excellent linear outlines of Russian literary history already: there is no place for another one, particularly not one that would need to simplify beyond recognition a literary culture with a large number of important writers, many of whom wrote big, complex books. Equally, I am wary of settling on some central ‘big idea’, given that there are already far too many ruminations on Russian literature that reduce sophisticated texts to inane clichés: the ‘superfluous man’ as the central theme of fiction, and so on. On the other hand, a theoretical discussion such as Tynyanov’s needs room to breathe, and is hard to follow if the source material it attempts to explain is unfamiliar. So what I have decided to do is to follow the lead of an earlier Very Short Introduction, Mary Beard and John Henderson’s eloquent and captivating Classics. Rather than running through the Peloponnesian Wars, Greeks and Persians, Athens as the birthplace of democracy, Rome as the birthplace of plumbing, the Conquest of Britain, and other landmarks of the subject as it used to be taught in the school room, Classics focuses on one particular artefact, the friezes from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia, using them as the starting point of a wide-ranging exploration of issues that are of current concern in the professional study of the Ancient World and of changing attitudes to the classical past.