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The Russian writer Lydia Ginzburg (1902–90) is best known for her Notes from the Leningrad Blockade and for influential critical studies, such as On Psychological Prose, investigating the problem of literary character in French and Russian novels and memoirs. Yet she viewed her most vital work to be the extensive prose fragments, composed for the desk drawer, in which she analyzed herself and other members of the Russian intelligentsia through seven traumatic decades of Soviet history. This book, the first full-length English-language study of the writer, presents Ginzburg as a figure of previously unrecognized innovation and importance in the literary landscape of the twentieth century. Based on a decade's work in Ginzburg's archives, the book discusses previously unknown manuscripts and uncovers a wealth of new information about the author's life, focusing on Ginzburg's quest for a new kind of writing adequate to her times. The book provides examples of universal experiences—frustrated love, professional failures, remorse, aging—and explores the modern fragmentation of identity in the context of war, terror, and an oppressive state. Searching for a new concept of the self, and deeming the psychological novel (a beloved academic specialty) inadequate to express this concept, Ginzburg turned to fragmentary narratives that blur the lines between history, autobiography, and fiction. This full account of Ginzburg's writing career in many genres and emotional registers enables us not only to rethink the experience of Soviet intellectuals, but to arrive at a new understanding of writing and witnessing during a horrific century.

This book shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called “the provinces”—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. The book looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. The book brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, the book argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border—have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. This book argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today. The book lays out several sides of the debate. It takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin's extreme views and their many responses—in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the body of this book. The book provides the keys to a vital post-Soviet writing culture; it is a guide to the variety of post-Soviet efforts to envision new forms of social life, even as a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken hold; and it introduces non-specialist readers to some of the most creative and provocative of present-day Russia's writers and public intellectuals.

This second book in a three-volume work on the young Fyodor Dostoevsky is a diary-portrait of his early years drawn from letters, memoirs, and criticism of the writer, as well as from the testimony and witness of family and friends, readers and reviewers, and observers and participants in his life. The result of an exhaustive search of published materials on Dostoevsky, this volume sheds crucial light on the many unexplored corners of Dostoevsky's life in the time between the success of his first novel, Poor Folk, and the failure of his next four works. The book lets the original writers speak for themselves — the good and the bad, the truth and the lies — and includes extensive notes with correctives, counterarguments, and other pertinent information. It looks closely at Dostoevsky's increasingly tense ties with Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, and other figures of the Russian literary world. It then turns to the individuals who afforded Dostoevsky security and peace amid the often-negative reception from fellow writers and readers of his early fiction. Finally, the book shows us Dostoevsky's break with the Belinsky circle; his struggle to stay afloat emotionally and financially; and his determination to succeed as a writer while staying true to his vision, most notably, his insights into human psychology that would become a hallmark of his later fiction.

This book explores Ivan Turgenev's relationship to nature through his conception, description, and practice of hunting — the most unquenchable passion of his life. Informed by an ecocritical perspective, the book takes an approach that is equal parts interpretive and documentarian, grounding the author's observations thoroughly in Russian cultural and linguistic context and a wide range of Turgenev's fiction, poetry, correspondence, and other writings. Included within the book are some of Turgenev's important writings on nature — never previously translated into English. Turgenev, who is traditionally identified as a chronicler of Russia's ideological struggles, is presented in the book as an expert naturalist whose intimate knowledge of flora and fauna deeply informed his view of philosophy, politics, and the role of literature in society. Ultimately, the book argues that we stand to learn a great deal about Turgenev's thought and complex literary technique when we read him in both cultural and environmental contexts. The book details how Turgenev remains mindful of the way textual detail is wedded to the organic world — the priroda that he observed, and ached for, more keenly than perhaps any other Russian writer.