Recent Soviet Studies in Russian Classical Literature

Abstract

Two of the authors of the works of literary criticism considered hlere are now dead; some are not well knowvn; one is a Lenin laureate and holds an Oxford doctorate honoris cauisa. They are all of roughily the same generation and as a group exhibit a high level of eruditioni as wvell as zeal to relate literature to life. Gorky once wrote, knowv my memory is overloaded with 'old things,' but I can't forget anything and I don't think it's necessary to. Professor Oksman, whose book' contains five stuidies of works by Ptushkin, Ryleev, Koltsov, Belinsky, and Turgenev, says that it is essential not to forget anything. H-e is not a comp. lit. man; he does not try to spin spider wiebs of influences. What he does has been called the synchronic method, and he is said to prefer examining the idea of a book to considering the skill with which its form is cast. Both these labels seen to me to be shown to be inadequate by the brilliance of this latest of Professor Oksman's books. Oksman knows that all genuine artistic images are expressions of ultimnate freedom. In this book, researched and written at various times in the course of his life, lhe seeks to establish the most plausible context in which a given work needs to be examined. He writes about books and ideas, not personalities; lhe smashles the historical and biographical cliches which little meen have been content to mumble and pass on, and produces new and brilliant literary reconstructions of his own. It used to be said that Ptishlkin fell into writing about Pugachev from preparing a study of Suvorov; Professor Oksman has shown that Pushkin used a project on Stuvorov as a cover to get at materials on Pugachev. The notion that Koltsov appeared in AMoscow as a semiliterate peasant and was shaped by Stankevich and Belinsky is destroyed by careful schiolarslhip and by literary confrontations, throtugh wihich Professor Oksman shows hlowl Sukhachev-leader of the onetime Odessa Society of Independents'-