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Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyovs
A critical look at the Russian gentry from the 1830s to the 1870s, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel The Golovlyovs exposes the insubstantiality of the family as one of the proclaimed bases of Russian social life. In sharp contrast to his contemporaries, including Aksakov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin shows the gentry family, as represented by the Golovlyovs, as disintegrating, corrupted by its status and way of life. The book, the sixth in the AATSEEL Critical Companions to Russian Literature series, begins with a brief sketch of Saltykov-Shchedrin's life and literary career, then goes on to explain the novel's content and characters, including reference to contemporary events relevant to the narrative and discussion of the major points of the novel and its conclusion. An extensive bibliography includes a listing and brief assessment of the various English translations of the novel.
The Golovlevs
Arina Petrovna rules the Golovlev family with an iron hand. Around her swarm her family; her alcoholic sons, dissipated grandchildren and degenerate husband. But in his darkened study, her son Porfiry schemes for an overthrow of power. In this powerful novel, the great Russian satirist presents a stark portrait of the Russian gentry sapped by generations of idleness and social irrelevance.
Metaphysical Exile
Robert Pippin presents here the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy as a whole. Pippin treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place. While discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin also treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of homelessness--a version that characterizes late modern life itself--and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge.
The Pompadours
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Don Quixote
When Soviet censors approved Mikhail Bulgakov's stage adaptation of Don Quixote, they were unaware that they were sanctioning a subtle but powerful criticism of Stalinist rule. The author, whose novel The Master and Margarita would eventually bring him world renown, achieved this sleight of hand through a deft interpretation of Cervantes's knight. Bulgakov's Don Quixote fits comfortably into the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of idealistic, troubled intellectuals, but Quixote's quest becomes an allegory of the artist under the strictures of Stalin's regime. Bulgakov did not live to see the play performed: it went into production in 1940, only months after his death. The volume's introduction provides background for Bulgakov's adaptation and compares Bulgakov with Cervantes and the twentieth-century Russian work with the seventeenth-century Spanish work.
Nervous People, and Other Satires
Among the most popular writers of the early Soviet period was the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose career spanned nearly four decades and who was as beloved by ordinary people as he was admired by the elite. His most popular pieces, often appearing in newspapers, were "short-short stories" written in a slangy, colloquial style. Typical targets of his satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and what a disdainful Soviet judge in one of the sketches dismisses as "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." Farcical complications, satiric understatement, humorous anachronisms, and an ironic contrast between high-flown sentiments and the down-to-earth reality of mercenary instincts were his favorite devices. Zoshchenko had an uncanny knack for eluding Soviet censorship (one of the sketches even touches humorously on the dangerous topic of party purges) and his work as a result offers us a marvelous window on life in Russia during the twenties and thirties.
The End of Imperial Russia, 1855–1917
This book explores the long-term reasons for the demise of Imperial Russia, examining the failure of the autocratic state to strengthen its own political position while economic change transformed Russian society. It seeks to explain its debilitating internal tensions and to link these to the pressures exerted by Russia's repeated failure in war and by the empire's continuing expansion. Lastly, it analyzes what led to Russia being governed, only eight months after the collapse of Tsarism, by the Bolsheviks' revolutionary regime.
The Cambridge History of Russian Literature
An updated edition of this comprehensive narrative history, first published in 1989, incorporating a new chapter on the latest developments in Russian literature and additional bibliographical information. The individual chapters are by well-known specialists, and provide chronological coverage from the medieval period on, giving particular attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and including extensive discussion of works written outside the Soviet Union. The book is accessible to students and non-specialists, as well as to scholars of literature, and provides a wealth of information.
