Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Narrative

Abstract

Novel Epics reassesses the origins of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, challenging the Lukacs-Bakhtin theory of epic. Frederick T. Griffiths and Stanley J. Rabinowitz take the Russian novel out of a specifically European context and show that it developed as a means of reconnecting that narrative form with its origins in classical and Christian in a way that expressed the Russian desire to renew and restore ancient spirituality. Through readings of Gogol's Dead Souls and Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, this book redefines epic and points to a new understanding of the sweep of Russian literature as a whole.