This book is intended to capture the interest of anyone who has been attracted to Russian culture through the greats of Russian literature, either through the texts themselves, or encountering them in the cinema, or opera. Rather than a conventional chronology of Russian literature, the book will explore the place and importance of literature of all sorts in Russian culture. How and when did a Russian national literature come into being? What shaped its creation? How have the Russians regarded their literary language? The book will uses the figure of Pushkin, 'the Russian Shakespeare' as a recurring example as his work influenced every Russian writer who came after hime, whether poets or novelists. It will look at such questions as why Russian writers are venerated, how they've been interpreted inside Russia and beyond, and the influences of such things as the folk tale tradition, orthodox religion, and the West ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Alexander Pushkin is Russia’s most beloved poet. Pushkin is a decedent of a noble family on his father’s side and on his mother’s side the great-grandson of Peter the Great’s Blackamoor slave, who was presented with his freedom and became a general in the tsar’s Navy. Pushkin’s poem “Ode to Liberty” brought hope to the Russian people during a time when other countries were defining their democracy. He is considered to be the Shakespeare of Russian literature having inspired many other writers to follow him. He was revered for his masterpiece Eugene Onegin, and like the hero in his masterpiece became changed by the woman he loved. As a poet, he was also known as the patron saint of dueling having fought many duels during his short life, often over a matter of words or women. His last duel was surrounded with mystery involving an anonymous letter accusing his wife of being unfaithful. He fought this duel to defend his wife’s honor and the mystery of the anonymous letter was never solved, until now! Explore the poetry and letters of Pushkin and read about his fascination with dueling, issues with religion, his struggles with censorship, the years he spent in exile while still serving the autocracy, his tribute to his comrades who fought in the Decembrist Uprising and his search for happiness as he finds and marries the most beautiful woman in all of Russia. Author M. A. DuVernet tells a captivating story of a black poet in Russia during the 1800’s, a man who believed in himself and became a legend in spite of the powerful few who hated him.

From the award-winning translators: the complete prose narratives of the most acclaimed Russian writer of the Romantic era and one of the world's greatest storytellers. The father of Russian literature, Pushkin is beloved not only for his poetry but also for his brilliant stories, which range from dramatic tales of love, obsession, and betrayal to dark fables and sparkling comic masterpieces, from satirical epistolary tales and romantic adventures in the manner of Sir Walter Scott to imaginative historical fiction and the haunting dreamworld of "The Queen of Spades." The five short stories of The Late Tales of Ivan Petrovich Belkin are lightly humorous and yet reveal astonishing human depths, and his short novel, The Captain's Daughter, has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature.

Provides a synthesising study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the 19th-century age of empire-building.

Russian writers of the nineteenth century were quite consciously creating a new national literary tradition. They saw themselves self-consciously through Western European eyes, at once admiring Europe and feeling inferior to it. This ambivalence was perhaps most keenly felt in relation to France, whose language and culture had shaped the world of the Russian aristocracy from the time of Catherine the Great. In How the Russians Read the French, Priscilla Meyer shows how Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy engaged with French literature and culture to define their own positions as Russian writers with specifically Russian aesthetic and moral values. Rejecting French sensationalism and what they perceived as a lack of spirituality among Westerners, these three writers attempted to create moral and philosophical works of art that drew on sources deemed more acceptable to a Russian worldview, particularly Pushkin and the Gospels. Through close readings of A Hero of Our Time, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina, Meyer argues that each of these great Russian authors takes the French tradition as a thesis, proposes his own antithesis, and creates in his novel a synthesis meant to foster a genuinely Russian national tradition, free from imitation of Western models. Winner, University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies

Imperial Russia before the 1917 Revolution had a great tradition of private collecting. In this book, the authors reconstruct a tour of the great Russian collections as they would have been just prior to the fall of the Romanovs. The collections are brought back to life by watercolours and drawings of their palaces, as well as photographs of interiors, family portraits and, naturally, by the works of art that they collected, now all in Russian museums or museums abroad.

In the course of his short, dramatic life, Aleksandr Pushkin gave Russia not only its greatest poetry–including the novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin–but a new literary language. He also gave it a figure of enduring romantic allure–fiery, restless, extravagant, a prodigal gambler and inveterate seducer of women. Having forged a dazzling, controversial career that cost him the enmity of one tsar and won him the patronage of another, he died at the age of thirty-eight, following a duel with a French officer who was paying unscrupulous attention to his wife. In his magnificent, prizewinning Pushkin, T. J. Binyon lifts the veil of the iconic poet’s myth to reveal the complexity and pathos of his life while brilliantly evoking Russia in all its nineteenth-century splendor. Combining exemplary scholarship with the pace and detail of a great novel, Pushkin elevates biography to a work of art.

Alexander Pushkin was a Russian poet and writer who is considered the father of the modern Russian novel. The so-called Golden Age of Russian Literature was inspired by the themes and aesthetics of Pushkin - we are talking about names like Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol. This selection of short stories brings you the best of Pushkin selected by August Nemo: The Queen of Spades The Shot The Snowstorm The Postmaster The Coffin-maker Kirdjali Peter, The Great's Negro