How Russian Literature Became Great explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating far beyond Russia's borders. Rolf Hellebust investigates a range of literary tendencies, philosophies, and theories from antiquity to the present: Roman jurisprudence to German Romanticism, French Enlightenment to Czech Structuralism, Herder to Hobsbawm, Samuel Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, and so on. Besides the usual Russian suspects from Pushkin to Chekhov, Hellebust includes European writers: Byron and Shelley, Goethe and Schiller, Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, Dante, Mickiewicz, and more. As elsewhere, writing in Russia advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments constituting an atemporal "ideal order among themselves" (T.S. Eliot). And yet this is a tradition that could only have been born at a specific moment in the golden nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building. The Russian example reveals the contradictions between immutability and innovation, universality and specificity at the heart of modern conceptions of tradition from Sainte-Beuve through Eliot and down to the present day. The conditions of its era of formation—the prominence of the crucial literary-historical question of the writer's social function, and the equation of literature with national identity—make the Russian classical tradition the epitome of a unified cultural text, with a complex narrative in which competing stories of progress and decline unfold through the symbolic biographical encounters of the authors who constitute its members. How Russian Literature Became Great thus offers a new paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.

When Constance Garnett's translations (1910–20) made Dostoevsky's novels accessible in England for the first time they introduced a disruptive and liberating literary force, and English novelists had to confront a new model and rival. The writers who are the focus of this study - Lawrence, Woolf, Bennett, Conrad, Forster, Galsworthy and James - either admired or feared Dostoevsky as a monster who might dissolve all literary and cultural distinctions. Though their responses differed greatly, these writers were unanimous in their inability to recognize Dostoevsky as a literary artist. They viewed him instead as a psychologist, a mystic, a prophet and, in the cases of Lawrence and Conrad, a hated rival who compelled creative response. This study constructs a map of English modernist novelists' misreadings of Dostoevsky, and in so doing it illuminates their aesthetic and cultural values and the nature of the modern English novel.

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This unique collection of the greatest novesl, short stories & plays in Russian literature has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards: Introduction: The Rise of the Russian Empire Novels & Novellas: Dead Souls Oblomov Fathers and Sons Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment The Idiot The Brothers Karamazov Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace Anna Karenina The Death of Ivan Ilych The Kreutzer Sonata Anton Chekhov: The Steppe: The Story of a Journey Ward No. 6 Mother (Maxim Gorky) Satan's Diary (Leonid Andreyev) Plays: The Inspector General; or, The Government Inspector (Nikolai Gogol) Anton Chekhov: On the High Road Swan Song, A Play in one Act Ivanoff The Anniversary; or, the Festivities The Three Sisters The Cherry Orchard… Leo Tolstoy: The Power of Darkness The First Distiller Fruits of Culture The Live Corpse The Cause of it All The Light Shines in Darkness Leonid Andreyev: Savva The Life of Man Short Stories: The Queen of Spades The Cloak The District Doctor The Christmas Tree and the Wedding God Sees the Truth, but Waits How A Muzhik Fed Two Officials The Shades, a Phantasy The Heavenly Christmas Tree The Peasant Marey The Crocodile Bobok The Dream of a Ridiculous Man Mumu The Viy Knock, Knock, Knock The Inn Lieutenant Yergunov's Story The Dog The Watch… Russian Folk Tales & Legends: The Fiend The Dead Mother The Dead Witch The Treasure The Cross-Surety The Awful Drunkard The Bad Wife The Golovikha The Three Copecks The Miser The Fool and the Birch-Tree The Mizgir The Smith and the Demon Ivan Popyalof The Norka Marya Morevna Koshchei the Deathless The Water Snake The Water King and Vasilissa the Wise The Baba Yaga Vasilissa the Fair The Witch The Witch and the Sun's Sister One-Eyed Likho Woe… Essays: On Russian Novelists Lectures on Russian Novelists

Essays on Russian prose writers from the Napoleonic to the Crimean Wars. During this period Russian culture and prose literature emerged as an autonomous phenomenon, no longer dependent on the patronage of the state. Includes discussion of the impact writing during this period had on the ever-widening abyss between the government and the literate public, the search for a national identify, the Decembrist Revolt and the resurgence of freemasonry.