Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The Complete Pushkin in English began publication in 1999. Recent single-volume translations include Pushkin’s Notebooks in Facsimile (London, 1995–8); A. D. P. Briggs (ed.), Alexander Pushkin: Selections (London, 1997); E. Feinstein (ed.), Pushkin Translated (Manchester, 1999); A. Kahn (ed.), Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, The Queen of Spades, The Captain’s Daughter, Peter the Great’s Blackamoor (Oxford, 1997). See also ‘A Pushkin Portfolio’, Modern Poetry in Translation 15 (1999), 144–277; Eugene Onegin, Translated with a Commentary by Vladimir Nabokov (Princeton, NJ, 1981); T. Shaw (ed.), The Letters of Alexander Pushkin (Bloomington, Ind., 1963).

Chapter 2

D. Bethea, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, Wisconsin, 1998); P. Debreczeny, ‘Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo: Pushkin’s Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture’, South Atlantic Quarterly 90 (1991), 269–302; M. C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, NY, 1989); K. Petrone, Life Has Become Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), chapter 5; A. Siniavsky, Strolls with Pushkin (New Haven, Conn., 1993); S. Vitale, Pushkin’s Button (London, 1999). See also the chapters by M. C. Levitt and S. Sandler in B. Gasparov, R. C. Hughes, and I. Paperno (eds.), Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley, 1992).

Chapter 3

For Pushkin’s own views on the canon, see Tatiana Woolf (ed.), Pushkin on Literature (London, 1971). C. R. S. Cockrell and D. Richards (eds.), Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford, 1976) and S. Hoisington (ed.), Russian Views of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (Bloomington, Ind., 1988) are useful anthologies of critical opinion. More generally, see J. Brooks, ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics’, in I. Banac, J. G. Ackerman, and R. Szporluk (eds.), Nation and Ideology (1981), 315–34; M. Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets (New York, 1962); S. Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (Basingstoke, 2000). On censorship, see M. T. Choldin and M. Friedberg (eds.), The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR (Boston, 1989); M. Dewhirst and R. Farrell (eds.), The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, NJ, 1973); D. Jones (ed.), Literary Censorship: A Reference Guide (London, 2001); L. Losev, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature (Munich, 1984).

Chapter 4

L. Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose (Princeton, NJ, 1990); G. S. Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace (Berkeley, 1987); A. Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, 1994).

Chapter 5