Review Article: New Russian Literary History

Abstract

The first “real” literary histories were written in the late eighteenth century; their heyday was in the nineteenth century (Positivism). As literary history became a mixture of biography, bibliography, description of sources and themes, and information on cultural, historical, and political background, it was criticized by the Russian Formalists, the Czech Structuralists, and the New Critics, who aimed at “pure” literary history. Later in the twentieth century doubts arose (Wellek; Perkins) about the possibility of writing a satisfactory history of literature: a literary history cannot be more than a collection of critical essays (Croce), a history of writers, institutions, and techniques. Despite these problems and criticisms, literary histories continue to be written: “comprehensive” histories, from a literature’s beginnings to the present, and histories of a group, genre, period, or masterworks. The article focuses on four recent histories of Russian literature: a comprehensive history; the history of a group (the Russian symbolists) during the First World War; a contribution to the history of the European novel through discussion of novels by Tolstoi and Dostoevskii; and a collection of essays on Russian underground and post-Soviet literature. Together they demonstrate the various forms literary history can take and how they can contribute to understanding a literature.