A History of Russian Literature
Kaup valmöguleikar
Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. A History of Russian Literature 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. The volume proceeds chronologically in five parts, extending from Kievan Rus' in the 11th century to the present day.
The coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic focus. Parts are organized thematically in chapters, which a number of keywords that are important literary concepts that can serve as connecting motifs and 'case studies', in-depth discussions of writers, institutions, and texts that take the reader up close and personal. Visual material also underscores the interrelation of the word and image at a number of points, particularly significant in the medieval period and twentieth century.
The History addresses major continuities and discontinuities in the history of Russian literature across all periods, and in particular brings out trans-historical features that contribute to the notion of a national literature. The volume's time range has the merit of identifying from the early modern period a vital set of national stereotypes and popular folklore about boundaries, space, Holy Russia, and the charismatic king that offers culturally relevant material to later writers.
This volume delivers a fresh view on a series of key questions about Russia's literary history, by providing new mappings of literary history and a narrative that pursues key concepts (rather more than individual authorial careers). This holistic narrative underscores the ways in which context and text are densely woven in Russian literature, and demonstrates that the most exciting way to understand the canon and the development of tradition is through a discussion of the interrelation of major and minor figures, historical events and literary politics, literary theory and literary innovation.
Nánar um bókina
- Oxford University Press Academic UK
- 9780192549532
- 9780199663941
- ePub
- 0
- Andrew Kahn; Mark Lipovetsky; Irina Reyfman; Stephanie Sandler
- English
- 2018-04-13
- 100
- 2
- 2
Kaflar
- Cover page
- Halftitle page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Note on the Text
- Dates
- Translations
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgments
- List of Plates
- Introduction
- The shapes of literary history
- The contexts of Russian literary history
- The scope and shape of the History of Russian Literature
- Part I The Medieval Period
- Introduction: Defining the medieval
- 1. Institutions and contexts: Writing and authorship, 1100–1400
- A new language for a new people: Old Church Slavonic
- Monastic writing: Translation, open boundaries, and selectivity
- The limits of the literary system_ Rhetoric, compilation, and genre
- The meaning of readership
- Scribal culture and the author function
- Literary identity: Collective writing and singularity
- Case study: The Voyage of Afanasy Nikitin: Self and other
- 2. Holy Rus´: Landmarks in medieval literature
- Founding stories: The Primary Chronicle
- Case study: The bylina and Russia’s magical kingdom
- The sermon: Ilarion and the chosen people of Kiev
- The prayer: Daniil Zatochnik
- Hagiography as life-writing
- Saints alive
- Hagiographic collections
- Founders and Holy Fathers: The example of St. Feodosy
- Miracle workers, the Virgin, and holy fools
- Case study: The holy fool in the modern tradition
- Ilarion redux: The fifteenth-century elaboration of hagiography
- Keyword Word-weaving
- 3. Local narratives
- Unhappy families: The trauma of invasion
- The Lay of Igor’s Campaign and the princely image
- Case study: National identity, medievalism, and the discovery of the Lay of Igor’s Campaign
- Narratives of invasion
- Catastrophic narratives: Defending Holy Russia
- From Grand Prince to Tsar, 1200–1565: Elevation through charisma
- Vladimir Monomakh
- Alexander Nevsky
- Dmitry Donskoi
- Ivan the Terrible: Tsardom and the absolutist “I”
- Center and periphery and the localism of the Tale of Petr and Fevronia
- Conclusion
- Part II The Seventeenth Century
- Introduction: The problem of transition and a new approach
- 1. Paradise lost: National narratives
- Narratives from the Time of Troubles to the Schism (1613–82)
- Visions of salvation
- Case study: Dukhovnye stikhi (poetic songs or spiritual rhymes)
- Literature of the Schism (Raskol)
- Case study: The Life of Archpriest Avvakum
- 2. Cultural interface: Printing, Humanist learning, and Orthodox resistance in the second half of the seventeenth century
- 3. Court theater
- KEYWORD Baroque
- 4. Poets
- New expressions and techniques
- Paradise regained: Simeon Polotsky’s poetic garden
- Friendship
- Mortality
- 5. Prose
- Popular fiction for a disrupted age: Social satire or literary fantasy?
- Petrine novellas and fantasy fiction
- Conclusion
- Part III The Eighteenth Century
- Introduction: The innovation of the eighteenth century
- 1. Defining classicism: The canons of taste
- KEYWORD Russian classicism
- Questions of language and style
- Case study: The creation of modern verse
- Literary quarrels and a culture of contest
- 2. Institutions of writing and authorship
- Court literature and absolutism_ The ode
- Court theater and tragedy
- The reform of comedy and comedy of reform
- The literary field: Writers and readership
- Literary journals
- Amateur writers, coteries, and readership
- The authority of the writer: Satirical journals, politics, and society
- The pleasures of literature
- The genius of the poet
- 3. National narratives
- The myth of Peter the Great and the progress narrative
- Case study: Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler
- Literary voices on civic virtue and absolute rule
- Case study: Aleksandr Radishchev and the philosophical life
- Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment: A contemporary critique
- 4. Poetics and subjectivities between classicism and Romanticism
- Writing a modern self: The discovery of feeling and the diary
- Case study: Radishchev and the experimental diary
- Poetry and self-creation
- Love and death
- Case study: Horatian monument poems from Lomonosov to Brodsky
- Modes of landscape
- 5. Prose Fiction
- Entertainment literature, or the problem of the novel
- Conclusion
- Part IV The Nineteenth Century
- Introduction: Defining the nineteenth century
- 1. Institutions
- Male poetic circles: Friendship and intellectual networks
- Case study: Dueling writers
- Radical friendships and female networks
- Case study: Albums
- 2. The literary field: From amateur societies to professional institutions and literary alliances
- Professionalization of literature: Thick journals and literary criticism
- Case study: Imperial censorshi
- Landmarks in criticism
- Case study: Nikolai Gogol
- 3. Subjectivities
- Diary-writing and autobiography: Documentary and fictional self-presentation
- Case study: Nadezhda Durova
- Case study: Leo and Sofia Tolstoy as diary-writers
- Elegy, love, and self-expression
- KEYWORD Romanticism
- 4. Forms of prose
- The emergence of prose and the genres of fiction
- The literature of Realism, the realism of literature: Fiction, class, society
- Case study: Realism/realism
- 5. Literary identity and social structure of the imperial period
- Cultural spaces
- KEYWORD Regional literature
- Educated elite
- Case study: Intelligentsia
- Peasantry
- Case study: Narod/The people
- Merchants
- The clergy
- State bureaucrats (chinovniki)
- Where do the raznochintsy fit?
- KEYWORD Nihilism
- Where all classes meet
- Case study: Corporal punishment
- 6 Types: Heroes and anti-heroes
- Romantic outcasts, “superfluous men”
- The genius
- Madmen
- “Little men”
- The provincial
- 7. Heroines and emancipation
- Status of women
- “The necessary woman”
- Mothers
- Wives and mistresses
- Fallen women and seductresses
- Revolutionaries
- Case study: Terrorism
- 8. Narratives of nation-building
- The dramatization and fictionalization of history
- Case study: War and Peace
- The search for national identity
- KEYWORD Sobornost´
- Case study: The national poet
- Conclusion
- Part V The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- Introduction: The shape of the period
- 1. Institutions
- Defining the Silver Age
- Literary groups of the 1920s
- Case study: Formalism
- Case study: Mikhail Bakhtin
- Literary life of the emigration, 1918 through the 1980s
- Creation of the Union of Soviet Writers
- Case study: Prorabotka, or political rebukes of writers
- Literature and politics after Stalin: Aesopian language and ideological divisions
- Samizdat, tamizdat, and the literary underground in the 1960s through 1980s
- Case study: The Moscow–Tartu School
- Perestroika and post-Soviet transformations of the literary field
- 2. The poetics of subjectivity
- Symbolists and Acmeists
- KEYWORDS Life-creation and self-construction (zhiznetvorchestvo)
- Case study: Anna Akhmatova
- Women’s writing as a modernist legacy
- Late modernism: Neo-Acmeism and other classical poetry
- Case study: Joseph (Iosif ) Brodsky
- Russian spiritual poetry
- Case study: Elena Shvarts
- Neo-Romanticism
- Interlude: Misfits in Russian poetry
- 3. The poetics of language
- Futurism
- Case study: Elena Guro
- Avant-gardists of the 1920s
- OBERIU
- Neo-avant-garde
- Concrete and Conceptualist poetry
- Case study: Dmitry Prigov’s “Militsaner”
- Metarealism
- Post-Soviet poetic languages
- 4. Prose and drama: Negotiations with history
- New forms of prose and drama
- Case study: Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreev
- Utopia and dystopia in early Soviet literature
- Grotesque modernism of the 1920s and 1930s
- Keyword Skaz
- Case study: Vladimir Nabokov
- Socialist Realism
- Women’s prose and drama of the 1960s through 1990s
- Case study: Liudmila Petrushevskaya
- Existentialist prose and drama of the 1960s through 1980s
- Underground modernisms of the 1960s through 1980s
- Postmodernist literature: From late Soviet underground to post-Soviet mainstream
- In-between prose
- 5. Catastrophic narratives
- Narratives of the Revolution and Civil War
- Case study: Isaac Babel
- Narratives of the Great Terror I
- Narratives of the war
- Narratives of the Great Terror II
- 6. Intelligentsia narratives
- Intelligentsia narratives of the 1900s through 1920s
- Intelligentsia narratives of the 1930s through 1950s
- Case study: Osip Mandelstam’s “I lost my way in the sky. . .”
- Intelligentsia narratives of the 1960s through 1980s
- Post-Soviet intelligentsia narratives
- Conclusion
- Guides to Further Reading
- Notes
- Part I. The Medieval Period
- Part II. The Seventeenth Century
- Part III. The Eighteenth Century
- Part IV. The Nineteenth Century
- Part V. The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- Picture Credits
- Figures
- Plates
- Index