Close encounters
Subtitle: essays on Russian literature
By: Robert Louis Jackson
Contributors: Bethea, David M., 1948- publishing director
Series: Ars Rossica; Ars Rossika
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 373
ISBN-13: 9781936235568; 9781618118110
Copyright date: 2013
Subjects: History and criticism; Themes, motives; Russian literature; Comparative literature
Description: "Close Encounters: Essays on Russian Literature combines discussions of ethical, esthetic, and philosophical interest raised by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky, with close analyses of their texts. This book focuses on four thematic configurations: first ("Chance and Fate"), issues of freedom and responsibility, the necessity of free individual expression and yet the limits of will, or self-will; second ("Two Kinds of Beauty"), the unity of moral, esthetic, and spiritual categories, and the quest for the ideal; third ("Critical Perspectives"), examples of the type of commentary that approaches art with a unified ethical and spiritual perspective (Dostoevsky, Gorky, V.I. Ivanov, and the partially dissenting Bakhtin); and fourth ("Poems of Parting"), three poems (works by Tyutchev, Severyanin, and Pushkin) involving parting, loss, and recovery."--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introductory note / Horst-Jürgen Gerigk; title: A glance at the essays; title: Moral-philosophical subtext in Pushkin's The stone guest; title: Turgenev's "Knock ... knock ... knock!" : the riddle of the story; title: Polina and lady luck in Dostoevsky's The gambler; title: Pierre and Dolokhov at the barrier : the lesson of the duel; title: Chance and design : Anna Karenina's first meeting with Vronsky; title: Breaking the moral barrier : Anna Karenina's night train to St. Petersburg; title: Uzhas in the subtext : Tolstoy's The death of Ivan Ilych; title: "What time is it? where are we going?" : Chekhov's The cherry orchard : the story of a verb; title: Two kinds of beauty; title: The sentencing of Fyodor Karamazov; title: The defiled and defiling "physiognomy" of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov; title: Dostoevsky's "Anecdote from a child's life" : a case of bifurcation; title: The triple vision : Dostoevsky's "The peasant Marey"; title: The making of a Russian icon : Solzhenitsyn's "Matryona's home"; title: Dostoevsky's concept of reality and its representation in art; title: In the interests of social pedagogy : Maxim Gorky's polemic with Dostoevsky; title: Bakhtin's Poetics of Dostoevsky and "Dostoevsky's Christian declaration of faith"; title: Vyacheslav I. Ivanov's poem "Nudus salta!" and the purpose of art; title: Intimations of mortality : Fyodor I. Tyutchev's "In parting there is a lofty meaning"; title: The poetry of memory and the memory of poetry : Igor Severyanin's "No more than a dream"; title: Supremum vale : the last stanzas of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Goethe, Zhukovsky, and the Decembrists; title: From the other shore : Nabokov's translation into Russian of Goethe's "Dedication" to Faust.