A History of Russian Literature

A History of Russian Literature by Terras, Victor. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780300059342.

This magisterial work written by one of the worlds foremost Slavic scholars presents a survey of Russian literature from its beginning in the eleventh century to modern times. Victor Terras argues eloquently that Russian literature has reflected defined and shaped the nations beliefs and goals and he sets his survey against a background of social and political developments and religious and philosophic thought. Terras traces a rich literary heritage that encompasses Russian folklore of the eleventh twelfth and thirteenth centuries medieval literature that in style and substance drew on the Byzantine tradition and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Russia passed through a succession of literary schools-neoclassicism sentimentalism romanticism and realism-imported from the West. Terras then moves on to the masterful realist fiction of Turgenev Dostoevsky and Tolstoi during the second half of the nineteenth century showing how it was a catalyst for the social and cultural advances following the reforms of Alexander II. In discussing the period preceding the revolution of 1917 Terras links the literary movements with parallel developments in the theater music and the visual arts explaining that these all placed Russia in the forefront of European modernism. Terras divides Russian literature after the revolution into émigré and Soviet writing and he demonstrates how the latter acted as a propaganda tool of the Communist party. He concludes his survey with the dissident movement that followed Stalins death arguing that the movement again made literature a leader in the struggle for freedom of thought genuine relevance and communion with Western culture.