A History of Russian Literature

Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. This volume provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life.

what Kahn, Lipovetsky, Reyfman and Sandler have managed to encompass and contextualize ... is nothing short of staggering.

Auteur
Andrew Kahn is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on Russian Enlightenment literature and on Russian poetry, including Pushkin's Lyric Intelligence (OUP, 2008, pbk. 2012). His studies often focus on the interplay between the history of ideas and how writers think with literature. Mark Lipovetsky is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA). He is the author of seven books on Russian literature and culture including Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999), Paralogies: Transformations of the (Post)Modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s-2000s (2008), and Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (with Birgit Beumers). He has co-edited the volume of Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers Since 1980 (Gale Group in 2003), an anthology of Russian and Soviet wondertales, Politicizing Magic (2005), Veselye chelovechki: Cult Heroes of Soviet Childhood (2008) , and A Non-Canonical Classic: D. A. Prigov (2010), Charms of Cynical Reason: the Trickster's Transformations in Soviet and post-Soviet Culture (2011), and edited (with Evgeny Dobrenko) Russian Literature since 1991 (CUP, 2015). Irina Reyfman is professor of Russian Language and Literature at Columbia University. In her studies, Reyfman focuses on the interaction of literature and culture, examining both how literature reacts to cultural phenomena and how it contributes to the formation of cultural biases and forms of behavior. Reyfman is the author of How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Rannks (Madison, Wisconsin, 2016), Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the `New' Russian Literature (Stanford, 1990), and Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford, 1999); the latter book also appeared in Russian (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002). She is also a co-editor (with Catherine T. Nepomnyashchy and Hilde Hoogenboom) of Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008). Stephanie Sandler is the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She has written on Pushkin and later myths about him, including Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989) and Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet (2004). Other interests include ideas of selfhood and identity in Russian literature and film, which led to a co-edited volume, Self and Story in Russian History (2000, with Laura Engelstein); and questions of sex and gender, subject of another edited volume, Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (1993, 1998, with Jane Costlow and Judith Vowles). She has co-edited a pioneering collection of essays on the contemporary poet Olga Sedakova, published in Russia in 2017 and due out in English with University of Wisconsin Press.

Contenu

• PART I. THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD

• Institutions and contexts: writing and authorship, 1100-1400

• Holy Russia: landmarks in medieval literature

• Local narratives

• PART II. THE EARLY MODERN: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

• Paradise Lost: National narratives

• Cultural interface: printing, Humanist learning and Orthodox resistance in the second half of the seventeenth century

• Court theater

• Poets

• Prose

• PART III. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

• Defining Classicism: the canons of taste

• Institutions of writing and authorship

• National narratives

• Poetics and subjectivities between Classicism and Romanticism

• Prose fiction

• PART IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

• Institutions

• The Literary Field: from amateur societies to professional institutions and literary alliances

• Subjectivities

• Forms of Prose

• Literary identity and social structure of the Imperial period

• Types: Heroes and anti-heroes

• Heroines and emancipation

• Narratives of nation-building

• PART V. THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

• Institutions

• The Poetics of Subjectivity

• The Poetics of Language

• Prose and Drama: negotiations with history

• Catastrophic narratives

• Intelligentsia narratives