Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide.

The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. The VSI Library now contains over 200 volumes-a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology-and will continue to grow to a library of around 300 titles.

VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS AVAILABLE NOW

For more information visit our web site

www.oup.co.uk/general/vsi/

Catriona Kelly

RUSSIAN LITERATURE

A Very Short Introduction

Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction ‘a great pleasure to read. It is a sophisticated, erudite, searching, and

subtle piece of work. It is written in a lively and stimulating manner, and

displays a range to which few of Dr Kelly’s peers in the field of Russian

scholarship can aspire.’

Phil Cavendish, School of Slavonic and East European Studies,

University of London ‘a brilliant essay, written with elegance, informed, incisive,

provocative … you may love it, perhaps loathe it, or feel perplexed,

but not remain indifferent.’

A. G. Cross, Cambridge University ‘Kelly’s brief but clear and effective study [is] a skilful blending of

literary personalities rather than leaning simply on chronology … it is

an original book, well done and documented, and extremely readable.’

John Bayley, St Catherine’s College, Oxford University

Preface

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.

There are also less obvious ways of writing introductions. One is the survey organized round a strong central thesis. Yury Tynyanov’s brilliant book Archaists and Innovators (1929), for instance, argued that literary evolution developed out of writers’ attitudes towards existing texts, whose ways of representing the world might be inertly copied, actively rejected, or at once absorbed and transformed. Another is the in-depth analysis of some technical aspect of the literary language. Mikhail Gasparov’s history of Russian versification, for example, examines how preferences for metrical forms have changed over the course of time and scrutinizes the weight of meaning carried by particular metrical measures at a given point in history.