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Asian Literature: Russia

Russian Literature

This page covers Russian literature. McKee Library's collection includes numerous titles by Russian authors. We have included a selection of these titles in our reading list, linked below. 

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A History of Russian Literature

This work presents a survey of Russian literature from its beginnings in the 11th century to modern times. Victor Terras argues that Russian literature has reflected, defined, and shaped the nation's beliefs and goals, and he sets his survey against a background of social and political developments and religious and philosophic thought.

Anna Karenina

A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval. Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs entirely to the woman whose name it bears, whose portrait is one of the truest ever made by a writer. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

The Development of Russian Verse

The Development of Russian Verse explores the Russian verse tradition from Pushkin to Brodsky, showing how certain formal features are associated with certain genres and, at times, specific themes. Michael Wachtel's basic thesis is that form is never neutral: poets can react positively in terms of stylization and development, or negatively in terms of parody or revision, to the work of their predecessors, but they cannot ignore it. Keeping technical terms to a minimum and providing English translations of quotations, Wachtel offers close readings of individual poems of more than fifty poets. He aims to help English-speaking readers reconstruct the strong sense of continuity that Russian poets have always felt, transcending any individual age or ideology. Ultimately, his 1999 book is an inquiry into the nature of literary tradition itself, and how it coalesces in a country that has always taken so much of its identity from its written legacy.

Russian Literature: a Very Short Introduction

This book is intended to capture the interest of anyone who has been attracted to Russian culture through the greats of Russian literature, either through the texts themselves, or encountering them in the cinema, or opera.Rather than a conventional chronology of Russian literature, the book will explore the place and importance of literature of all sorts in Russian culture. How and when did a Russian national literature come into being? What shaped its creation? How have the Russians regarded their literary language? The book will uses the figure of Pushkin, 'the Russian Shakespeare' as a recurring example as his work influenced every Russian writer who came after hime, whether poets or novelists. It will look at such questions as why Russian writers are venerated, how they've been interpreted inside Russia and beyond, and the influences of such things as the folk tale tradition, orthodox religion, and the West.

Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic

In Russia, gothic fiction is often seen as an aside - a literary curiosity that experienced a brief heyday and then disappeared. In fact, its legacy is much more enduring , persisting within later Russian literary movements . Writing Fear explores Russian literature's engagement with the gothic by analysing the practices of borrowing and adaptation. Katherine Bowers shows how these practices shaped literary realism from its romantic beginnings through the big novels of the 1860s and 1870s to its transformation during the modernist period. Bowers traces the development of gothic realism with an emphasis on the affective power of fear. She then investigates the hybrid genre's function in a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address social and political issues such as urban life, the woman question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family. By mapping the myriad ways political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism, Writing Fear challenges the conventional literary history of nineteenth-century Russia.

Solzhenitsyn

Arguably one of the most significant writers of the 20th century, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, often has been stereotyped as a prophet of doom, a pessimist, someone out of touch with reality, and irrelevant. Pearce sets out to challenge this typical media typecasting. Among the features of this major biography are exclusive personal interviews with Solzhenitsyn, previously unpublished poetry, a rare photo gallery, and a focus on the rich faith dimension of this Nobel Prize-winner's life.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One of the most important literary biographies of recent times, this is not only the story of one of this century's greatest writers, but the history of Russia itself. Already featured in a controversial New York Times article, this magisterial biography will attract attention throughout the literary world. 16-page photo insert.

How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories

These short works, ranging from Tolstoy's earliest tales to the brilliant title story, are rich in the insights and passion that characterize all of his explorations in love, war, courage, and civilization. These short works, ranging from Tolstoy's earliest tales to the brilliant title story, are rich in the insights and passion that characterize all of his explorations in love, war, courage, and civilization.

Boris Pasternak, 1890-1928

This authoritative new biography of the Russian poet and prose writer Boris Pasternak is the first part of a two-volume set, covering the period 1890-1928. Drawing on archives and many eyewitness accounts, Barnes' study sheds light on currently unexplored aspects of Pasternak's character and family background, and his artistic, social and historical environment. He combines biographical investigation with detailed textual analysis of translated quotations in verse and prose to reveal the source of Pasternak's extraordinary writings. The book examines a wide range of topics that include his musical enthusiasm and relations with Scriabin, his philosophical studies, his activities in World War I and his response to the 1917 revolutions, and his stance as a liberal artistic intellectual in the 1920s.

The Marsh of Gold

Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process, and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether, are presented here in his own words (in translation) and are discussed in the extensive commentaries and introduction. The texts range from 1910 to 1946 and are between two and ninety pages long. There are commentaries on all the texts, as well as a final essay on Pasternak's famous novel, Doctor Zhivago, which is looked at here in the light of what it says on art and inspiration. Although universally acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Pasternak is not yet sufficiently recognized as the highly original and important thinker that he also was. All his life he thought and wrote about the nature and significance of the experience of inspiration, though avoiding the word "inspiration" where possible as his own views were not the conventional ones. The author's purpose is (a) to make this philosophical aspect of his work better known, and (b) to communicate to readers who cannot read Russian the pleasure and interest of an "inspired" life as Pasternak experienced it.

Doctor Zhivago

Traces the life of surgeon-poet Yury Zhivago before and during the Russian Revolution. Married to an upper-class girl who is devoted to him, yet he finds himself in love with an unfortunate woman who becomes his muse. Zhivago becomes torn between fidelity and passion. Sympathetic with the Bolshevik revolution, but shaken by the wars and purges, he struggles to retain his individualism as a humanist amid the spirit of collectivism.

War & Peace

Television adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's timeless masterpiece of love and loss, focusing on the consequences faced by three Russian families during the Napoleonic Wars.