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These ten critical essays, written by leading specialists in nineteenth-century Russian literature, provide new readings on the works from the first decade of ltierary life of Doystoevsky and Tolstoy.
About the author
Elizabeth Cheresh Allen received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 1984, where she taught for seven years. Since 1991, Allen has taught at Bryn Mawr College as Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Beyond Realism: Turgenev¿s Poetics of Secular Salvation (Stanford UP, 1992) and A Fallen Idol is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transition (Stanford UP, 2007). She is also the editor of The Essential Turgenev (Northwestern UP, 1994) and co-editor of Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson (Northwestern UP, 1995).
Summary
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by leading specialists in nineteenth-century, Russian literature, give fresh, sophisticated readings to works from the first decade of the literary life of each Russian author—for Dostoevsky, the 1840s; for Tolstoy, the 1850s. Collectively, these essays yield composite portraits of these two artists as young men finding their literary way. At the same time, they show how the early works merit appreciation for themselves, before their authors were Titans.
Additional text
“This collection of essays exposes readers to early works, most of them little-known or studied, by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Each work is a radical experiment by these young titans, and each anticipates mature masterpieces while representing a road not taken. The contributors to the volume are all well established scholars of nineteenth-century Russian literature who address the works from new perspectives. It opens and closes with excellent commentary — by its editor Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Caryl Emerson respectively — that knits the volume together.”
