Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak

The authors read some of the classics in the Russian novelistic tradition against a critique of the Lukacs-Bakhtin view of epic, all the while demonstrating the modernity of epic as a literary mode and arguing how some key Russian novels challenge or outgrow their generic form to re-imagine or re-invent a new, monumental one. The chapters on Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, have major implications for understanding the sweep of Russian literature as a whole, while the final chapter on Stalinist epic, which includes fresh insights on Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam, considers other literary genres—the memoir and the narrative poem—against the background of the epic tradition. Teachers, graduate students, undergraduates as well as serious non-academic critics will profit from the original arguments which provide suggestions for re-reading Russian prose generally.