The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

256 Notes to pages 86–103

For a balanced view of Fonvizin’s biography, see the Introduction by Marvin Kantor to Dramatic Works ofD. I. Fonvizin, trans. Marvin Kantor (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1974).

In Mira Mendelson’s libretto for Prokofiev’s War and Peace, this rebuke from Mme Akhrosimova to Natasha (Book Two, Part IV, ch. 18) is amplified by Gallophobic references not in the original.

Iakov B. Kniazhnin, Misfortune from a Coach, in The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. and trans. Harold B. Segal (New York: Dutton, 1967), pp. 374-93, quote on p. 384. Translation adjusted.

Mikhail D. Chulkov, The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched Woman, in Segal, The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, pp. 26-68; quote on p. 29.

Almost alone in the scholarly literature on Chulkov (which tends to condemn both Martona and her milieu), Alexander Levitsky develops this thesis of The Comely Cook as a mock novel targeting literary pretensions rather than social injustice. See Alexander Levitsky, “Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook: The Symmetry of a Hoax,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 2.21 (1988): 97-115.

Olia Prokopenko, “The Real-Life Protagonist of Mikhail Chulkov’s Comely Cook: A Hypothesis,” Slavic and East European Journal 48.2 (Summer 2004): 225-46.

Gitta Hammarberg, “The Literary and Intellectual Context,” ch. 1, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially pp. 10-12.

See Brown, “Russian Prose of the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century,” A History of 18th Century Russian Literature, pp. 544-47.

5 Romanticisms

For the convincing case that Pushkin partook only sparingly of European Romanticism and not at all of “Realism” (a term that appeared on the continent and in Russia in its present literary meaning only in the late 1840s), see Boris Gasparov, “Pushkin and Romanticism,” in The Pushkin Handbook, ed. David M. Bethea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 537-67.

For this transition from court patronage to professionalism via familiar associations, salons, and booksellers, see William Mills Todd III, “Institutions of Literature,” ch. 2, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 45-105.

Yu. M. Lotman, “Liudi i chiny” [People and ranks], Besedy o russkoi kul'ture (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1994), pp. 18-45, esp. 20.

For a fascinating prehistory of Pushkin’s duel and the intricacies of his outraged honor, see Serena Vitale, Pushkin’s Button, trans. Ann Goldstein and John Rothschild (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), especially ch. 6.

This reading of the Onegin-Lensky duel was first laid out by Yury Lotman in his Commentary to Eugene Onegin, 1980. See Yu. M. Lotman, “Evgenii Onegin. Kommentarii,” Pushkin (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1995), p. 679.