Overview

The Russian novel remains a subject of enduring interest for scholars, students, and general audiences. Russian novels were initially influenced by the parallel traditions of novel-writing in Britain, France, and Germany, but the Russian novel exists as its own tradition and asserts its own identity as a literary form. To read a Russian novel often requires the fortitude to traverse many hundreds of pages and to consider profound political, philosophical, and metaphysical questions. The best-known Russian novels are also compulsively readable, providing a fascinating window into Russian culture and society at different historical periods. Readers of Russian novels marvel at the fictional world-building of innovative writers who created compelling characters and settings, realized through brilliant storytelling and stylistic virtuosity. Major Russian novelists such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nabokov continue to be popular and to carry intellectual prestige, but the tradition of the Russian novel extends well beyond these familiar authors and their works. The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel draws from a valuable tradition of critical commentary dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and builds upon important earlier scholarship, while significantly updating our understanding of the Russian novel: showcasing newer interpretive paradigms, considering works outside the canon, and extending the story of the Russian novel through Soviet times and up to the varied literary landscape of the present. These chapters also explore an increasingly expansive view of what constitutes a Russian novel, part of ongoing efforts to communicate our evolving understanding of the tradition.

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9780197520857

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Julie Buckler has spent her academic career at Harvard. She works on nineteenth-century Russian literature, performing arts, and urban cultures. Buckler is the author of two award-winning books: The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia (Stanford, 2000) and Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityscape (Princeton, 2005). In addition to The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel, Buckler has also co-edited two other collection of essays: Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe (Northwestern, 2013) and Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action (Wisconsin, 2018). Justin Weir has been a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University since 2000. His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Russian novels, literary theory, and Soviet film. His publications include a volume of translations edited and translated with Timothy Langen (Eight Russian Plays, Northwestern UP, 2000), and two monographs devoted to Russian novelists: The Author as Hero: Self and Tradition in Nabokov, Pasternak, and Bulgakov (Northwestern UP, 2002), and Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative (Yale UP, 2011). A Russian translation of The Author as Hero was published by Academic Studies Press in 2022.

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