Pestereva, E. (2021). The instinct of enlightenment. St. Petersburg: Aleteya. (In Russ.)

Abstract

The book is a collection of Elena Pestereva’s philological and critical articles, overviews, reviews, and essays. Equally good are ‘one-off pieces’ and continued articles devoted to the recurrent and highly appreciated characters of Tsvetkov, Yuriev, and Gandlevsky. The book contains over fifty articles, grouped into three sections. The section entitled ‘Context’ features chapters on festivals and poetry, literary awards and poetry, and specific cases of visual arts and poetry. The section ‘Text’ discusses the poets from the Moscow Time [Moskovskoe vremya] circle and the Lwów school of poetry, as well as prose writers, critics and their books. ‘Intertext’ contains reviews of new books, originally for the ‘Bookcase’ column of the Novaya Yunost journal. E. Pestereva possesses a refined literary taste, which inspires confidence in the readers of various media (thick literary journals, young adult magazines or glossies). And, even more importantly for a critic who substantiates her personal preferences with a scholarly argument, she is familiar with modern psychological methods.