Efnisyfirlit

• Half-title
• Series-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Critical models, committed readers, and three Russian Ideas
• Literary critics and their public goods
• Three Russian Ideas
• The socially marked, quasi-sacred Word
• Russian space: never-ending, absorptive, unfree
• A family of human faces
• Chapter 2: Heroes and their plots
• Righteous persons [pravednik (m.) / pravednitsa (f.)]
• Fools
• Frontiersmen
• Rogues and villains
• Society’s misfits in the European style
• The heroes we might yet see, and what lies ahead
• Chapter 3: Traditional narratives
• Saints’ lives: sacrificial, holy-foolish, administrative, warrior
• Folk tales (Baba Yaga, Koshchey the Deathless)
• Hybrids: folk epic and Faust tale
• Miracle, magic, law
• Chapter 4: Western eyes on Russian realities: the eighteenth century
• Neoclassical comedy, Gallomania, cruelty: art instructs life
• Chulkov’s Martona: life instructs art
• Karamzin’s “Poor Liza”
• Chapter 5: The astonishing nineteenth century: Romanticisms
• Pushkin and honor (its reciprocity, roundedness, and balance)
• Duels
• Gogol and embarrassment (its linearity, lopsidedness, evasiveness)
• Pretendership (two authors, two plays, two novels)
• Chapter 6: Realisms: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov
• Biographies of events, and biographies that are quests for the Word
• Time-spaces (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy)
• Dostoevsky and books
• Tolstoy and doing without words
• Poets and novelists (Dostoevsky and Nekrasov)
• Anton Chekhov: lesser expectations, smaller forms
• Chapter 7: Symbolist and Modernist world-building: three cities, three novels, and the Devil
• The fin de siecle:` Solovyov, Nietzsche, Einstein, Pavlov’s dogs, political terrorism
• Modernist time-spaces and their modes of disruption
• City myths: Petersburg, Moscow, OneState
• Chapter 8: The Stalin years: socialist realism, anti-fascist fairy tales, wilderness
• What was socialist realism?
• Cement and construction (Fyodor Gladkov)
• The Dragon and destruction (Evgeny Shvarts)
• Andrei Platonov and suspension
• The “right to the lyric” in an Age of Iron
• Chapter 9: Coming to terms and seeking new terms:from the first Thaw (1956) to the end of the millen
• The intelligentsia and the camps (Solzhenitsyn)
• The Underground Woman (Petrushevskaya)
• Three ways for writers to treat matter: eating it, transcending it, cracking its codes (Sorokin, Pe
• Notes
• Introduction
• 1 Models, readers, three Russian Ideas
• 2 Heroes and their plots
• 3 Traditional narratives
• 4 The eighteenth century
• 5 Romanticisms
• 6 Realisms
• 7 Symbolist and Modernist world-building
• 8 The Stalin years
• 9 From the first Thaw to the end
• Glossary: Pronunciations and definitions of Russian words, names, places, and texts
• Words
• People
• Places
• Guide to further reading
• General background and useful reference
• Biographies of Russian writers featured in this book
• Russian literary criticism for the non-specialist relevant to the framework of this book
• Index