Best of
Russian-Literature
1981
Lectures on Russian Literature
Vladimir Nabokov - 1981
“This volume... never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians” (Anthony Burgess). Edited and with an Introduction by Fredson Bowers; illustrations.
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Varlam Shalamov - 1981
Varlam Shalamov, considered by many to be Russia's greatest living writer, spent seventeen years there and set down the Kolyma experience in powerful short stories. This is the second, more extensive collection which presents a somewhat different view of the camps and the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances.
The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories
David Richards - 1981
Twenty major Russian writers are represented in this collection, beginning with Pushkin, the founder of modern Russian literature, and concluding with contributions from such eminent modern writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The great novelists of the nineteenth century are included here, from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Turgenev, alongside those writers who devoted their genius almost exclusively to the short story: Bunin, Babel and that master of the genre, Chekhov.
A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky's Novel
Victor Terras - 1981
Victor Terras’s companion work provides readers with a richer understanding of the Dostoevsky novel as the expression of a philosophy and a work of art. In his introduction, Terras outlines the genesis, main ideas, and structural peculiarities of the novel as well as Dostoevsky’s political, philosophical, and aesthetic stance. The detailed commentary takes the reader through the novel, clarifying aspects of Russian life, the novel’s sociopolitical background, and a number of polemic issues. Terras identifies and explains hundreds of literary and biblical quotations and allusions. He discusses symbols, recurrent images, and structural stylistic patterns, including those lost in English translation.
Tales from M. Saltykov-Shchedrin
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin - 1981
"The Mighty Bogatyr" and "The Eagle-Patron of Arts" are biting satires on autocracy; "The Crow That Went in Search of Truth" and "The Old Nag" picture the misery of the Peasants; the conceited lion of "Bears in Government" with his ludicrous "self-pawed" inscriptions, is a well-aimed thrust at the illiterate resolutions of Tsar Alexander III, while the Bruins in the same tale ridicule the woebegone ministers of tsarist Russia. But the message of the tales and the bitter truth conveyed in them go far beyond the limits of any one epoch, assuming ever new poignancy and actuality. "The sole object of my literary work," wrote Saltykov-Shchedrin, "was unfailingly to protest against greed, hypocrisy, falsehood, theft, treachery, stupidity..." The Tales, which he wrote during the last years of his life (1826-89), epitomize the entire work of the great satirist who did so much for the cause of revolutionary thought in Russia.