Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism : A Reader - Lindsay Ceballos

At the turn of the twentieth century, Symbolist writers and thinkers at the forefront of Russian modernism cast Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy as their chosen ancestors-examples to be exalted, repudiated, and ultimately surpassed. Their writings transformed the way these novelists were read within and beyond the Russian Empire. Many of the Symbolist writings on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were long unavailable in English or were only available in outdated or unreliable translations. Presenting fresh annotated translations of some of the most influential Symbolist essays, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism opens this globally influential body of criticism to a new anglophone audience. Readers will discover threads that extend toward writers from Sigmund Freud and J. M. Coetzee to Virginia Woolf and Mikhail Bakhtin. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism will appeal to students encountering Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's novels for the first time and to scholars of literary history and theory. This volume fills a longstanding gap in the study of Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's novels and provides English-speaking readers with a missing key to the absorbing-and ongoing-story of their reception.