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Cambridge Introductions to Literature
The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
Russian literature arrived late on the European scene. Within several generations, its great novelists had shocked - and then conquered - the world. In this introduction to the rich and vibrant Russian tradition, Caryl Emerson weaves a narrative of recurring themes and fascinations across several centuries. Beginning with traditional Russian narratives (saints' lives, folk tales, epic and rogue narratives), the book moves through literary history chronologically and thematically, juxtaposing literary texts from each major period. Detailed attention is given to canonical writers including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, as well as to some current bestsellers from the post-Communist period. Fully accessible to students and readers with no knowledge of Russian, the volume includes a glossary and pronunciation guide of key Russian terms as well as a list of useful secondary works. The book will be of great interest to students of Russian as well as of comparative literature.
308 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2008
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May 27, 2025
While immersed in Gary Saul Morson's "Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter" (2023; see my review) I paused to peruse his former collaborator, Princeton's Caryl Emerson, for coordinates before I plunged deeper. It sketched contexts orienting me. Refreshed, I returned to "Wonder" less prone to my callow hunches or shallow vagaries.
For Emerson gives the "advanced beginner" with a cursory knowledge of the canon in translation and general course of the nation (me, to a tee) an ambitious, yet compact, overview of key themes, such as Word, Space, Face, and then surveys texts to illustrate her theories. These may be topical, or largely chronological. But the necessary scope informs the novice about this formidable terrain, habitually stereotyped, simplified, exaggerated, parodied, and propagandized in our West, fearing and warping.
For example, she shows how the reliance on Old Church Slavonic limited Greek and Latin inculcation. This sparked either Gallomania or -philia in the early modern period among the smart set, who gave higher status to French than their native tongue. Or, despite evil depredations under Stalin, content creators welcomed not having to bow to craven demands of Hollywood to produce "quality" art that'd uplift the masses, hasten progress, and instill values inimical to capitalist immorality. You don't have to back Uncle Joe to reflect on why such appeals resonated for so long, outside the USSR too. It's fresh to be challenged to reconsider how from behind the Iron Curtain, "we" were viewed with disdain...
I think the part on 18c. neoclassical drama, for instance, could have been trimmed, to allow greater attention to the issues she raises during the Soviet hegemony, but that's my preference. Certainly in the probably scant page count (she notes 23k words were cut from her draft), Emerson manages to educate us confidently, and granted the complexity of different perspectives distinguishing this field from its British, Continental, American, and "world" literary and cultural counterparts, within this handbook, she distills a lot of raw material into palatable and even pleasurable portions to ponder.
For Emerson gives the "advanced beginner" with a cursory knowledge of the canon in translation and general course of the nation (me, to a tee) an ambitious, yet compact, overview of key themes, such as Word, Space, Face, and then surveys texts to illustrate her theories. These may be topical, or largely chronological. But the necessary scope informs the novice about this formidable terrain, habitually stereotyped, simplified, exaggerated, parodied, and propagandized in our West, fearing and warping.
For example, she shows how the reliance on Old Church Slavonic limited Greek and Latin inculcation. This sparked either Gallomania or -philia in the early modern period among the smart set, who gave higher status to French than their native tongue. Or, despite evil depredations under Stalin, content creators welcomed not having to bow to craven demands of Hollywood to produce "quality" art that'd uplift the masses, hasten progress, and instill values inimical to capitalist immorality. You don't have to back Uncle Joe to reflect on why such appeals resonated for so long, outside the USSR too. It's fresh to be challenged to reconsider how from behind the Iron Curtain, "we" were viewed with disdain...
I think the part on 18c. neoclassical drama, for instance, could have been trimmed, to allow greater attention to the issues she raises during the Soviet hegemony, but that's my preference. Certainly in the probably scant page count (she notes 23k words were cut from her draft), Emerson manages to educate us confidently, and granted the complexity of different perspectives distinguishing this field from its British, Continental, American, and "world" literary and cultural counterparts, within this handbook, she distills a lot of raw material into palatable and even pleasurable portions to ponder.
January 29, 2021
The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature started oh so well. While I was a little cagey about the name of the first chapter (Models, readers, three Russian Ideas), the author's statement that she would not impose on "defenceless primary texts" modern, non-Russian ideas and categories - "alien instruments devised in some context distant or indifferent" as she puts it - sounded like a welcome avoidance of an overly technical look at Russian literature.
Unfortunately for me, a non-scholar of literature, what apparently passes for appropriately contemporaneous and native categorisation seemed just as arbitrary and unilluminating as those Caryl Emerson avoids. Much of the book involves either unhelpful and jargonistic literary analysis or arbitrary and meaningless conceptualising (for want of a better phrase).
A good example of the jargon-heavy, academically indulgent analysis involves the application of the concept of a "chronotope" - or "time-space". An example of a truly Russian literary idea, Michail Bakhtin adopted this neologism to connote the nature of time and space within a literary work (considered almost as a living organism that sustains itself). But - beyond this vague definition and the application of the notion to many authors' chronotopes - I am utterly non the wiser on what it means or what value it added to the discussion.
An example of the latter issue identified above - arbitrary conceptualising (I can't name it better but you'll know it when you see it) - is the discussion of the Petersburg myth. This idea was "formalised as a research area ... when Yury Lotman and his fellow semioticians turned their attention to the 'Petersburg text' as exemplary of the cultural symbolism of cities. With Russian space in mind, they drew up several robust distinctions". What follows is a discussion of how the "city as a demarcated site could stand in one of two relationships to the undeveloped territory surrounding it". These two types are cities which spread out to define the surroundings (concentric cities), such as Rome; or cities which stand in an "antagonistic relation to the wilderness it ruled" (eccentric cities) such as Alexandria.
In the context of 20th century Russian literature, the relevance is to the paradoxical nature of Petersburg. As we are told: "in this startling set of images from urban semiotics, we see the outline of a Nitzschean dichotomy. Petersburg is an unstable ... city of Dionysian energies, barely contained by an Apollonian crust of rock and granite". The references to Greek gods refer to the barely controlled, swamp locale and chaotic, frenetic energy of the city (Dionysius) as against the rigid, rectilinear nature of the planned city.
All of this discussion is used for an analysis of Andrei Bely's Petersburg novel. Not only can I not tell you what "urban semiotics" adds to the discussion (another instance of needless literary scholarliness as per my first criticism above) I cannot even tell you what it is. Moreover, these "robust distinctions" appear anything but; the author here and elsewhere acts as if concepts (like eccentric and concentric cities) are somehow discovered or exist in some manner. Either way they are deemed important enough to frame the discussion. I, however, find these to be nothing more than arbitrary, grafted on concepts, serving only to break up the flow of the biographical, contextual and aesthetic considerations of these Russian texts.
Which is not to say all of the concepts Emerson introduces are needlessly obfuscatory. The resonance between Gogol and Dostoevsky as a "line" that can be traced through to later authors versus the alternate Pushkin-Tolstoy axis is a helpful heuristic for thinking about Russian styles. Crucially, this hinges on a thorough and intelligible discussion of what makes these authors important and unique and how they are interrelated. We hear, for example, how laughter is a key aspect of the "Gogol" line versus the honour pivotal to the "Pushkin" line with examples given for both.
The discussion of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is probably the book at its best. We are treated to a wide-ranging discussion of these two giants of Russian writing, with helpful philosophical discussion framing the analysis but not over-encumbering it. For instance, Emerson develops a very useful distinction between Dostoevskian characters who are argued to represent ideas (think of Ivan Karimazov's atheism) against Tostoy's characters who act not out of an idea but "out of a bundle of good and bad habits, some conscious, but most not ... In Tolstoy, a person's identity is most secure when it is most flexible, that is, when not fastened down to a single coherent unfolding idea."
At the heart of the distinction between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for Emerson, is a contrast between Tolstoy's "brave individualism" and Dostoevsky's "brave dialogism". For Tolstoy, it is entirely down to the individual to develop. As an example, the author outlines the difference between guilty Tolstoyan and guilty Dostoevskian characters: the former would never "invite others inside to share the burden" of their guilt or to absolve them of it. Dostoevsky's by contrast, rely on others to absolve them or reveal their guilt. We see Raskolnikov require the intervention of others to bring about his transformation, while Dimitri Karamazov meekly accepts his wrong conviction for murder, waiting for someone else to say it wasn't him. What these discussions help reveal is a thoroughgoing difference between the two authors that I found exceptionally insightful: from the internal, slow (near static) development of Tolstoy's characters from multiple perspectives, to the external, dynamic and often chaotic development of Dostoevsky's characters through interaction and dialogue (hence his perspective is bravely dialogic).
In another stand-out passage, we are treated to a discussion of how Tolstoy considered Dostoevsky's style monotonous - a peculiar charge "given the brilliant diversity and manifest excitement of a Dostoevskian hero's high-pitched life". But, for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky's "crisis and hysteria" were, in fact, "monotonous, homogenising behavioural states. For the duration of this unnatural condition, people tend to sound and act alike ... For Tolstoy, only stable forms of living and interacting can create genuine heterogeneity." Dostoevskian heroes, Tolstoy suspected, were in relationships with ideas and not with other human beings and so could never get at the truth of things: human meaning unobstructed into ideology. Since, for Tolstoy," a big self-justifying idea is like a big crisis, a big crime, or a big scandal: it isn't true, it tells you very little about what's going on and it won't last."
It is perhaps inevitable that I would struggle with this book since I am not a scholar - though the dust jacket claims the book is of interest to "readers who want to broaden their understanding of the books and authors they enjoy". Maybe I would have been less critical had I not recently read Harold Bloom's controversial The Western Cannon. While that book has serious flaws of its own, the central discussion of what makes literature great is brilliantly uncouched in complex and abstruse theories. Semioticians even make an appearance in Bloom's book (the first time I'd encountered the word) but only as objects of scorn for their attempts to define greatness in books in terms of their service to the ideological.
It would be unfair to brand Emerson entirely as a peddler of theories and who ignores the key aesthetic qualities of a work, however. She is, at times, positively Bloomean: her definition of "fully novelistic heroes" lines up with Bloom's aesthetic demand that they "both change themselves and presume that they live in a changing environment, which will present them with unexpected challenges to which they must respond". Later, the brilliance of Dostoevsky is highlighted by his capacity to "endow his heroes - including his negative ones - with so much independence, mobility of perspective, uncertainty of motive and potent storytelling skill that readers ... directly bypass the author/narrator and respond directly to the heroes."
All of which gave me - both in reading Bloom and Emerson - meaningful conceptual tools with which to look at literature in new ways. Unfortunately, the weight of academic verbiage so burdens the book as a whole as to make these oases of insight just that: small watering holes in an arid landscape.
Unfortunately for me, a non-scholar of literature, what apparently passes for appropriately contemporaneous and native categorisation seemed just as arbitrary and unilluminating as those Caryl Emerson avoids. Much of the book involves either unhelpful and jargonistic literary analysis or arbitrary and meaningless conceptualising (for want of a better phrase).
A good example of the jargon-heavy, academically indulgent analysis involves the application of the concept of a "chronotope" - or "time-space". An example of a truly Russian literary idea, Michail Bakhtin adopted this neologism to connote the nature of time and space within a literary work (considered almost as a living organism that sustains itself). But - beyond this vague definition and the application of the notion to many authors' chronotopes - I am utterly non the wiser on what it means or what value it added to the discussion.
An example of the latter issue identified above - arbitrary conceptualising (I can't name it better but you'll know it when you see it) - is the discussion of the Petersburg myth. This idea was "formalised as a research area ... when Yury Lotman and his fellow semioticians turned their attention to the 'Petersburg text' as exemplary of the cultural symbolism of cities. With Russian space in mind, they drew up several robust distinctions". What follows is a discussion of how the "city as a demarcated site could stand in one of two relationships to the undeveloped territory surrounding it". These two types are cities which spread out to define the surroundings (concentric cities), such as Rome; or cities which stand in an "antagonistic relation to the wilderness it ruled" (eccentric cities) such as Alexandria.
In the context of 20th century Russian literature, the relevance is to the paradoxical nature of Petersburg. As we are told: "in this startling set of images from urban semiotics, we see the outline of a Nitzschean dichotomy. Petersburg is an unstable ... city of Dionysian energies, barely contained by an Apollonian crust of rock and granite". The references to Greek gods refer to the barely controlled, swamp locale and chaotic, frenetic energy of the city (Dionysius) as against the rigid, rectilinear nature of the planned city.
All of this discussion is used for an analysis of Andrei Bely's Petersburg novel. Not only can I not tell you what "urban semiotics" adds to the discussion (another instance of needless literary scholarliness as per my first criticism above) I cannot even tell you what it is. Moreover, these "robust distinctions" appear anything but; the author here and elsewhere acts as if concepts (like eccentric and concentric cities) are somehow discovered or exist in some manner. Either way they are deemed important enough to frame the discussion. I, however, find these to be nothing more than arbitrary, grafted on concepts, serving only to break up the flow of the biographical, contextual and aesthetic considerations of these Russian texts.
Which is not to say all of the concepts Emerson introduces are needlessly obfuscatory. The resonance between Gogol and Dostoevsky as a "line" that can be traced through to later authors versus the alternate Pushkin-Tolstoy axis is a helpful heuristic for thinking about Russian styles. Crucially, this hinges on a thorough and intelligible discussion of what makes these authors important and unique and how they are interrelated. We hear, for example, how laughter is a key aspect of the "Gogol" line versus the honour pivotal to the "Pushkin" line with examples given for both.
The discussion of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is probably the book at its best. We are treated to a wide-ranging discussion of these two giants of Russian writing, with helpful philosophical discussion framing the analysis but not over-encumbering it. For instance, Emerson develops a very useful distinction between Dostoevskian characters who are argued to represent ideas (think of Ivan Karimazov's atheism) against Tostoy's characters who act not out of an idea but "out of a bundle of good and bad habits, some conscious, but most not ... In Tolstoy, a person's identity is most secure when it is most flexible, that is, when not fastened down to a single coherent unfolding idea."
At the heart of the distinction between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for Emerson, is a contrast between Tolstoy's "brave individualism" and Dostoevsky's "brave dialogism". For Tolstoy, it is entirely down to the individual to develop. As an example, the author outlines the difference between guilty Tolstoyan and guilty Dostoevskian characters: the former would never "invite others inside to share the burden" of their guilt or to absolve them of it. Dostoevsky's by contrast, rely on others to absolve them or reveal their guilt. We see Raskolnikov require the intervention of others to bring about his transformation, while Dimitri Karamazov meekly accepts his wrong conviction for murder, waiting for someone else to say it wasn't him. What these discussions help reveal is a thoroughgoing difference between the two authors that I found exceptionally insightful: from the internal, slow (near static) development of Tolstoy's characters from multiple perspectives, to the external, dynamic and often chaotic development of Dostoevsky's characters through interaction and dialogue (hence his perspective is bravely dialogic).
In another stand-out passage, we are treated to a discussion of how Tolstoy considered Dostoevsky's style monotonous - a peculiar charge "given the brilliant diversity and manifest excitement of a Dostoevskian hero's high-pitched life". But, for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky's "crisis and hysteria" were, in fact, "monotonous, homogenising behavioural states. For the duration of this unnatural condition, people tend to sound and act alike ... For Tolstoy, only stable forms of living and interacting can create genuine heterogeneity." Dostoevskian heroes, Tolstoy suspected, were in relationships with ideas and not with other human beings and so could never get at the truth of things: human meaning unobstructed into ideology. Since, for Tolstoy," a big self-justifying idea is like a big crisis, a big crime, or a big scandal: it isn't true, it tells you very little about what's going on and it won't last."
It is perhaps inevitable that I would struggle with this book since I am not a scholar - though the dust jacket claims the book is of interest to "readers who want to broaden their understanding of the books and authors they enjoy". Maybe I would have been less critical had I not recently read Harold Bloom's controversial The Western Cannon. While that book has serious flaws of its own, the central discussion of what makes literature great is brilliantly uncouched in complex and abstruse theories. Semioticians even make an appearance in Bloom's book (the first time I'd encountered the word) but only as objects of scorn for their attempts to define greatness in books in terms of their service to the ideological.
It would be unfair to brand Emerson entirely as a peddler of theories and who ignores the key aesthetic qualities of a work, however. She is, at times, positively Bloomean: her definition of "fully novelistic heroes" lines up with Bloom's aesthetic demand that they "both change themselves and presume that they live in a changing environment, which will present them with unexpected challenges to which they must respond". Later, the brilliance of Dostoevsky is highlighted by his capacity to "endow his heroes - including his negative ones - with so much independence, mobility of perspective, uncertainty of motive and potent storytelling skill that readers ... directly bypass the author/narrator and respond directly to the heroes."
All of which gave me - both in reading Bloom and Emerson - meaningful conceptual tools with which to look at literature in new ways. Unfortunately, the weight of academic verbiage so burdens the book as a whole as to make these oases of insight just that: small watering holes in an arid landscape.
September 21, 2017
Russian literature is notoriously self-reflexive and, sometimes, quite baffling for me. Russian literary characters usually crave for some unattainable thing, not things like money, sex, love, marriage, success or adventure. Also, some myths consolidated along Russian literary history which have added to my confusion: saints, cities, biographies of certain writers, even ideological and ethical systems have added some difficulty.
This introduction is an excellent book for beginners who want to know more about the Russian prose canon. The author, Caryl Emerson, moves through literary history chronologically and thematically. Poetry has been excluded (because there is another Cambridge Introduction tome which focuses entirely on poetry), as well as the Russian émigré community (including Nabokov), and women (because the prose canon includes very few women). However, detailed attention is given to Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Platonov, Shvarts, Gladkov and several others. All the books mentioned are available in good English translations so it is very likely that your TBR list will grow substantially if you read this engrossing book.
This introduction is an excellent book for beginners who want to know more about the Russian prose canon. The author, Caryl Emerson, moves through literary history chronologically and thematically. Poetry has been excluded (because there is another Cambridge Introduction tome which focuses entirely on poetry), as well as the Russian émigré community (including Nabokov), and women (because the prose canon includes very few women). However, detailed attention is given to Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Platonov, Shvarts, Gladkov and several others. All the books mentioned are available in good English translations so it is very likely that your TBR list will grow substantially if you read this engrossing book.
January 15, 2024
So I struggled with this book because it’s supposed to be aimed at readers who don’t have a lot of familiarity with the Russian language or literature…but a lot of it still went over my head.
FWIW, I have a Master’s in English literature, though I admittedly I haven’t studied Russian literature previously, though I knew of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn.
I just didn’t have enough context or prerequisite knowledge to appreciate other things. I think this could make a great book as part of a class, maybe interspersed more regularly with the actual texts itself. Or perhaps if there was a clearer, less jargon-y, “bigger picture” for each chapter before delving into specific details would have helped things stick more fully.
I am looking forward to reading more of the texts throughout this year, but I think I’ll still look for short introductions to each classic to situate it in its broader contexts.
FWIW, I have a Master’s in English literature, though I admittedly I haven’t studied Russian literature previously, though I knew of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn.
I just didn’t have enough context or prerequisite knowledge to appreciate other things. I think this could make a great book as part of a class, maybe interspersed more regularly with the actual texts itself. Or perhaps if there was a clearer, less jargon-y, “bigger picture” for each chapter before delving into specific details would have helped things stick more fully.
I am looking forward to reading more of the texts throughout this year, but I think I’ll still look for short introductions to each classic to situate it in its broader contexts.
April 30, 2021
When I first purchased this introductory text, I assumed it would have literature in it to illustrate the concepts being described. Instead, this is a densely packed text that takes readers from early Russian folk tales through postmodernism with an overview of the literary trends and tropes that comprise one of the world's most robust literary canons. This is a must-read for teachers of Russian literature.
May 8, 2013
This was a pretty good starter to Russian literature, but it felt a little disorganized at times. I was astounded that the author wrote that "each verbal unit literally explodes on the ear with a mass of lexical and rhythmic associations." Even if she's talking about oral occlusives, they would be exploding (sort of) on the tongue or lips.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews