Kelly Catriona. Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Oxford University Press, 2001. — 184 p. — (Very Short Introduction). — ISBN 0-19-280144-9.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.List of illustrations
List of Maps
Testament
I have raised myself a monument: writer memorials and cults
Tidings of me will go out over all
great Rus: Pushkin and the Russian literary canon
I shall be famous as long as another poet lives: writers’ responses to Pushkin
Awakening noble feelings with my lyre: writers as masters of minds
And don’t dispute with fools: men, women, and society
Every tribe and every tongue will name me: Russian literature and primitive culture
O muse, be obedient to the command of God: the spiritual and material worlds
Further reading