Many Russian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made a hug? impact, not only inside the boundaries of their own country but across the Western world. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of these novels, in fourteen newly commissioned essays by prominent European and North-American scholars. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philosophy; the Romantic, Realist, and Modernist traditions; and technique, gender, and theory. In this context the work of Pushkin, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, among others, is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading; all quotations are in English. This volume will be invaluable not only for students and scholars but for anyone interested in the Russian novel.
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors - page ix
Editors' preface - xi
Acknowledgments - xvi
Note on transliteration and translation - xvii
Chronology - xviii
1 Introduction - 1
MALCOLM V.JONES
Part 1: The setting 2 The city - 21
ROBERTA. MAGUIRE
3 The countryside - 41
MUCH McLEAN
Part 2: The culture
4 Politics - 63
W. GARETH JONES
5 Satire - 86
LESLEY MILNE
6 Religion - 104
JOSTEIN B0RTNES
7 Psychology and society - 130
ANDREW WACHTEL
8 Philosophy in the nineteenth-century novel - 150
GARY SAUL MORSON
Part 3. The literary tradition 9 The Romantic tradition - 171
SUSANNE FUSSO
10 The Realist tradition - 190
VICTOR TERRAS
11 The Modernist tradition - 210
ROBERT RUSSELL
Part 4: Structures and readings
12 Novelistic technique - 233 ROBERT BELKNAP
13 Gender - 251
BARBARA HELDT
14 Theory - 271
CARYL EMERSON
Guide to further reading - 294
Index - 298
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Robert belknap is Professor of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous articles on Russian literature; his books include The Structure of "The Brothers Karamazov" and The Genesis of ''''The Brothers Karamazov."
(ostein B0RTNES is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Bergen. His books include Visions of Glory: Studies in Early Russian Hagiography.
Caryl. emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is translator and author of several books on Mikhail Bakhtin, on Russian music, and of articles on Russian nineteenth-century prose, philosophical thought, and readings of Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Pushkin. She is also General Editor of Studies in Russian Literature and Theory for Northwestern University Press.
Susanne fusso, Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Wesleyan University, is the author of Designing "Dead Souls": An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol, and co-editor with Priscilla Meyer of Essays on Gogoclass="underline" Logos and the Russian Word. She is now writing a study of Dostoevskii's Adolescent.
Barbara heldt is Professor Emerita of Russian, University of British Columbia. She is author of Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, translator of Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life, Kozma Prutkov: The Art of Parody, and author of numerous articles and contributions to symposia on Russian literature.
Malcolm v. jones is Emeritus Professor in Residence at the University of Nottingham. The author of books and articles on Tolstoi, Dostoevskii and other aspects of Russian literature and intellectual history, he is also President of the International Dostoevsky Society and has recently retired as General Editor of Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature.
W. gareth jones is Professor of Russian at the University of Wales, Bangor. His publications include books and articles on aspects of the Russian eighteenth-
century enlightenment, Tolstoi, Chekhov, and other topics from Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.
ROBERT a. maguire is Bakhmeteff Professor of Russian Studies at Columbia University. His books include Red Virgin Soiclass="underline" Soviet Literature in the 15120s, Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, and Exploring Gogol. He has also translated widely from Russian and Polish.
HUGH Mclean is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Nikolai Leskov: the Man and his Work and articles on Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi, Kushchevskii, Chekhov, Maiakovskii and Zoshchenko.
robin feuer miller is the author of Dostoevsky and "The Idiot": Author, Narrator, and Reader and of "The Brothers Karamazov": Worlds of the Novel, as well as of essays on Russian and comparative literature. She edited Critical Essays on Dostoevsky and co-edited Kathryn Feuer's Tolstoy and the Genesis of "War and Peace." She is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University.
LESLEY Milne is Reader in Modern Russian Literature at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of books and articles on twentieth-century Russian satire. Her most recent books are Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography and an edited volume, Bulgakov: The Novelist-Playwright.
GARY saul morson is Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University and has written studies of Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Bakhtin. Best known for his theories of "prosaics" and "sideshadowing," his most recent book, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, won the René Wellek award.
Robert russell is Professor of Russian at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of books and articles on Valentin Kataev, Russian drama of the 1920s, and other aspects of twentieth-century Russian literature.
victor terras is Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor Emeritus, Brown University, Providence, R.I. A native of Estonia, he immigrated to the United States in 1952, where he resumed his academic career, interrupted by the war, in 1959. He has taught Russian and Comparative literature at several American universities. He is the author of many books and articles on Russian literature including A History of Russian Literature.
ANDREW wachtel is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University. He is author of books and articles on the representation of childhood in Russian culture, on the writing of history by Russian novelists, on the ballet Petrushka, and on Russian art and music.
EDITORS' PREFACE
The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel is not a history of the Russian novel. It is a collection of essays chiefly about those Russian novels and novelists - emigres excepted - that have made a significant impact on world literature and about the tradition that they represent. It is in this sense that the word "classic" is used, not to confer status, but to acknowledge effect. Forty years ago, Harold Orel, remarking that the importance of the Russian novel in English literary history could hardly be overemphasized, wrote:
Henry James referred to Turgenev as "le premier romancier de son temps"; George Moore, who admired Tolstoy's "solidity of specification," referred to Anna Karenina as the world's greatest novel; Robert Louis Stevenson interpreted Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a room, "a house of life," into which a reader could enter, and be "tortured and purified"; Galsworthy sought "spiritual truth" in the writings of Turgenev and Tolstoy; and Arnold Bennett compiled a list of the twelve greatest novels in the world, a list on which every item came from the pen of a Russian author.1