Russian literature

Chapter 80: FOOTNOTES:

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Essays, Letters & Speeches Russian Literature

About This Book

A series of lectures surveys Russian literary development from folk songs and medieval chronicles through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, outlining how language, genres, and social conditions shaped poetic, prose, and dramatic forms. The author sketches early influences, then examines leading poets, novelists, dramatists, and critics—treating representative works and currents associated with figures such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Themes include realism, the interplay of art and social and political ideas, the nation’s linguistic richness, and the influential role of criticism. Throughout, literature is presented as a primary medium for expressing collective aspirations and moral debates.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] I borrow these remarks about the predecessors of Byelínskiy from an article on Literary Criticism in Russia, by Professor Ivánoff, in the Russian Encyclopædic Dictionary, Vol. 32, 771.

[25] The speech of Homyakóff is reproduced in Skabitchévskiy’s History (l. c.). I was very anxious to get Tolstóy’s speech, because I think that the ideas he expressed about “the permanent in Art, the universal” hardly did exclude the denunciation of the ills from which a society suffers at a given moment. Perhaps he meant what Nekrásoff also meant when he described the literature to which Schédrin’s Provincial Sketches had given origin as “a flagellation of the petty thieves for the pleasure of the big ones.” Unfortunately, this speech was not printed, and the manuscript of it could not be found.