The Irony of the Ideal : : Paradoxes of Russian Literature /

The Irony of the Ideal : : Paradoxes of Russian Literature / / Mikhail Epstein.

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This book explores the major paradoxes of Russian literature as a manifestation of both tragic and ironic contradictions of human nature and national character. Russian literature, from Pushkin and Gogol to Chekhov, Nabokov and to postmodernist writers, is studied as a holistic text that plays on th...

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Bibliographic Details
VerfasserIn:
Epstein, Mikhail,
Place / Publishing House:Boston, MA : : Academic Studies Press, , [2017]
©2017
Year of Publication:2017
Language:English
Series:Ars Rossica
Online Access:
Physical Description:1 online resource (440 p.)
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Table of Contents:
  • Frontmatter
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Translator's Note
  • Introduction
  • Part I: The Titanic and the Demonic: Faust's Heirs
  • 1. Faust and Peter on the Seashore: From Goethe to Pushkin
  • 2. The Bronze Horseman and the Golden Fish: Pushkin's Fairy Tale-Poem
  • 3. The Motherland-Witch: The Irony of Style in Nikolai Gogol
  • Part II: The Great in the Little: Bashmachkin's Offspring
  • 1. The Saintly Scribe: Akaky Bashmachkin and Prince Myshkin
  • 2. The Figure of Repetition: The Philosopher Nikolai Fedorov and His Literary Prototypes
  • 3. The Little Man in a Case: The Bashmachkin-Belikov Syndrome
  • Part III: The Irony of Harmony
  • 1. Childhood and the Myth of Harmony
  • 2. The Defamiliarization of Lev Tolstoy
  • 3. Soviet Heroics and the Oedipus Complex
  • Part IV: Being as Nothingness
  • 1. A Farewell to Objects, or, the Nabokovian in Nabokov
  • 2. The Secret of Being and Nonbeing in Vladimir Nabokov
  • 3. Andrei Platonov between Nonbeing and Resurrection
  • 4. Dream and Battle: Oblomov, Korchagin, Kopenkin
  • Part V: The Silence of the Word
  • 1. Language and Silence as Forms of Being
  • 2. The Ideology and Magic of the Word: Anton Chekhov, Daniil Kharms, and Vladimir Sorokin
  • 3. The Russian Code of Silence: Politics and Mysticism
  • Part VI: Madness and Reason
  • 1. Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method: Poets and Philosophers
  • 2. Poetry as Ecstasy and as Interpretation: Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandel'shtam
  • 3. The Lyric of Idiotic Reason: Folkloric Philosophy in Dmitrii Prigov
  • The Cyclical Development of Russian Literature
  • Conclusion
  • Works Cited
  • Index of Subjects
  • Index of Names

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