The Books of My Life: The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

As someone interested in Russian history, Russian culture, and Russian literature I greatly enjoyed reading Caryl Emerson's The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 2009).

Emerson's book is neither exhaustive or encyclopedic. If you are looking for an excellent if somewhat out of date encyclopedia of Russian literature I recommend Handbook of Russian Literature edited by Victor Terras and published by the Yale University Press in 1985. What Emerson's introduction is, is first, a study of Russian literature grounded in, though not in a literalist or fundamentalist way, a Bakhtinian approach to culture which emphasises time and space. Second,  it is a study of several culturally important Russian ideas--the Russian word, Russian space, and faces. Third, it is an exploration of Russian cultural types--righteous persons, fools, frontiersmen, rogues and villains, misfits, and heroes. Fourth, it is an exploration of Russian narrative forms--saints, religious and secular, folk tales, folk epics, Faustian tales, miracle tales, magical tales, and legal tales. Finally, it is an exploration of how those ideals, types, and tales, played themselves out in Russian and Soviet literature in the eighteenth century, the romantic nineteenth century, the realist nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the symbolist and modernist twentieth century, the socialist realist twentieth century, and, if briefly, the postmodernist late twentieth and twenty-first century.

There were a number of things I liked about Emerson's book. I greatly enjoyed her exploration of the cultural continuities between eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century Russian literary culture and twentieth century Soviet literary culture. I enjoyed Emerson's discussion of Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, as representative of symbolist and modernist Petersburg, Moscow, and dystopian cultural cityscapes in early twentieth century Russia and the USSR. I enjoyed Emerson's exploration of how Soviet socialist realism was, simultaneously, something old and something new, though I sometimes felt she overemphasised the newness of Soviet socialist realism.

Highly recommended. Perhaps one day someone will explore, if they already haven't, how Ayn Rand's sense of self as a secular saintly hero, how for her any other social formation other than free market libertarianism was demonic or Faustian, and how her narcissism, a product in part of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Nietzschean romanticism, are at the heart of her economic thought and literary texts. I suppose we might be able to throw Igor Stravinsky and Vladimir Nabokov into the same pot.