The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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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Notes to pages 14-28 251

In Delo 10 (October 1870), as cited in Charles A. Moser, Esthetics as Nightmare: Russian Literary Theory 1855-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 29.

The reference occurs in Crime and Punishment, Part IV, ch. 5, where Porfiry Petrovich mentions General Mack surrendering at Ulm (a crucial episode in War and Peace, Book One, Part II, ch. 3).

This underexplored area is currently being researched by Kathleen Parthe; see her “Civic Speech in the Absence of Civil Society,” European Association for Urban History, Stockholm Conference (2006).

Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2000), p. 5.

Amy Mandelker, “Lotman’s Other: Estrangement and Ethics in Culture and Explosion,” in Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions, ed. Andreas Schonle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 63.

Nicolas Berdyaev, TheRussian Idea [1947] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), especially ch. 10, pp. 252-55.

Wendy Helleman, ed., The Russian Idea: In Search of a New Identity (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2004).

Thomas Seifrid, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language 1860-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 3.

Kathleen F. Parthe, Russia’s Dangerous Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 2-23.

Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 12.

Prince D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 4.

Parthe, Russia’s Dangerous Texts, pp. 24-28.

Marshall T. Poe, The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Poe argues that it was not the “Mongol Yoke” that barbarized Russia, but rather her proximity to savagely aggressive European states, with their cutting-edge weaponry.

Mikhail Epstein, “Russo-Soviet Topoi,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), pp. 277-306, esp. 278.

Mikhail Vasil'evich Il'in, “Words and Meanings: On the Rule of Destiny. The Russian Idea,” in The Russian Idea, ed. Wendy Helleman, pp. 33-55, esp. 37 and 40-41.

Alexander Pushkin, A Journey to Arzrum, trans. Birgitta Ingemanson (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1974), p. 51.

Mikhail Veller, “Khochu v Parizh” [I Want to Go to Paris], as discussed in Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 159.

252 Notes to pages 29–40