The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

“Frol Skobeev, the Rogue,” in Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky (New York: Dutton, 1963), pp. 474-86, quote on p. 484. This indispensable and well-annotated anthology is the source of all pre-Petrine texts discussed in this volume.

Marcia A. Morris, The Literature of Roguery in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000). Morris devotes a chapter to each of these four types.

Nakobov provides for both poshlost! and poshlyak a marvelous phonic and semantic analysis during his discussion of Chichikov, hero of Dead Souls, in Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1944), pp. 63-71.

Simeon Polotsky: “The Merchant Class,” in Medieval Russia’s Epics, ed. Zenkovsky, pp. 518-19.

For a lucid survey of these (and other) pre-Byronic European heroes, see Peter L. Thorslev Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), pp. 52-61.

For a survey of the Gothic tradition as Russian writers assimilated it (largely from the British), see Mark S. Simpson, The Russian Gothic Novel and its British Antecedents (Ann Arbor, MI: Slavica, 1983); for its later democratization, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 183-213.

This thesis is developed in Ellen B. Chances, Conformity’s Children: An Approach To The Superfluous Man in Russian Literature (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1978).

My survey here is indebted to Molly W. Wesling, Napoleon in Russian Cultural Mythology (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).

254 Notes to pages 56–66

Letter from Turgenev to the poet Afanasy Fet, April 6, 1862, cited here from the Norton Critical Edition of Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. and ed. Michael R. Katz (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 174.

For a discussion of Maksim Gorky’s views on Dostoevsky, see Vladimir Seduro, Dostoyevski in Russian Literary Criticism 1846–1956 (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), pp. 83–93.

3 Traditional narratives

Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 155.

For a lucid introduction, see Dmitry S. Likhachev [Likhachov], dean of Russian medievalists, especially his “Religion: Russian Orthodoxy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture, ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 38–56; and Dmitry Likhachov, The Great Heritage: The Classical Literature of Old Rus (Moscow: Progress, 1981), especially “The First Seven Hundred Years of Russian Literature,” pp. 7–31.

With the exception of the folk tales and the folk epic Ilya Muromets, all texts discussed in this chapter (plus other vital genres such as chronicles, sermons, laments, and historical tales) can be found in Serge Zenkovsky, ed., Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (New York: Dutton, 1963). Referred to in body of text as Z.

The best introduction to “dual faith” remains George P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind: Kievan Christianity, the 10th to the 13th Centuries (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975), chs. 1, 2, and 4.

Simon Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Demonism and Orthodox Tradition,” in Russian Literature and its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 31–58, esp. 40.

Faith Wigzell, “The Russian Folk Devil and His Literary Reflections,” in Russian Literature and its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 59–86, esp. 67.

For a pathbreaking study of Russian paganism and early Christianity from the perspective of their female traits, see Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), especially ch. 3 on Mother Earth.

Katerina Clark, “Three Auxiliary Patterns of Ritual Sacrifice,” ch. 8, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd edn. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 178–82.