Close Encounters : Essays on Russian Literature

Essays on Russian Literature: Moral-Philosophical Configurations 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 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.

Drawing on the prose, poetry, and criticism of a broad range of Russian writers and critics, including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bakhtin, Gorky, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn, Close Encounters: Essays on Russian Literature explores themes of chance and fate, freedom and responsibility, beauty and disfiguration, and loss and separation, as well as concepts of criticism and the moral purpose of art. Through close textual analysis, the author offers a view of the unity of form and content in Russian writing and of its unique capacity to disclose the universal in the detail of human experience. With an emphasis on Dostoevsky, Close Encounters foregrounds ethical and spiritual concerns of Russian writers and stimulates the reader to pursue his or her own critical exploration of Russian literature. This work will be of interest to academic libraries, university students, and specialists in literature, criticism, philosophy, and esthetics, as well as enthusiastic general readers of Russian literature.