Overview

For nearly two centuries readers all over the world have turned to the great canon of Russian literature. Love and death, war and peace, yes, even crime and punishment; readers across the globe have found in Russian writing a substantial measure of intellectual provocation, aesthetic pleasure, emotional resonance, and personal solace. Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature explores the familiar names of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov to connect readers with these experiences. With a lively, jargon-free style and insightful analyses of thought-provoking texts, this concise volume helps you to understand more fully the pleasure to be found in reading, and re-reading. By identifying what readers seek and find in Russian books—from aesthetically pleasing descriptions to apt psychological renderings—Angela Brintlinger aims to enhance the gratification of reading, giving armchair travelers an excuse to embark on a series of fascinating journeys. Drawing on Brintlinger’s experiences as a scholar, teacher, and reader of literature, the book is informed by a deep cultural understanding of Russia and Russians. It reveals this through engaging literary meditations that connect Russian literature to the losses, ironies, and ambiguities that define the human condition. Exploring authors’ imagined readers as well as authors themselves, Brintlinger argues that it is these readers, from all over the world, who get to decide what literary works are worth reading. As a bonus, she offers an appendix with more names and titles, familiar and perhaps utterly new—books that show the ways in which Russian literature remains vital today.

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9781350242142

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Reviews

Four great writers, and some gentle guidance into instructive corners of their world. Angela Brintlinger reminds us why we should not lose our way to these wisdom-laden places. * Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Emerita, Princeton University, USA *

Author Information

Angela Brintlinger is Professor of Slavic Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, USA. Her scholarly work includes numerous essays and articles in English and Russian as well as books on biography (Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture, 1917- 1937, 2000) and war (Chapaev and his Comrades: War and the Russian Literary Hero in the Twentieth Century, 2012) and edited volumes on a variety of topics: Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (2007), Chekhov for the Twenty-First Century (2012), and Seasoned Socialism: Food and Gender in Late Soviet Everyday Life (2019). In her blog The Manic Bookstore Café, Brintlinger links the present—both the extraordinary and the quotidian—with some of her favorite writers, artworks and cultural phenomena.

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