The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Notes

Introduction

Michael Wachtel, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. ix.

Prince D. S. Mirsky, Pushkin (London: Routledge, 1926), p. 239.

This understanding of literary tradition is eloquently argued in Michael Wachtel, The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially in his “Afterword: The Meaning of Form,” pp. 239-59.

Milan Kundera, “Die Weltliteratur”, New Yorker (January 8, 2007), 28-35, quote on p. 30.

This observation was made by the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) while editing some Czech versions of Pushkin in the late 1930s. See Jakobson, “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry” [1960], in Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 121-44, especially 121-22.

“Some Words about War and Peace” [1868], in Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, ed. George Gibian, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 1090.

Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Between the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the most popular works on the market were detective serials, melodrama, and adventure thrillers.

The term “negative identity” comes from Lev Gudkov’s collection of essays (1997-2002) Negativnaiaidentichnost (Moscow: Novoeliteraturnoe obozrenie, 2004);especially pp. 282-84.

1 Models, readers, three Russian Ideas

1 “Krome chteniya, idti bylo nekuda”; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 1993), Part II, ch. 1,p. 48.

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