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E-book
Author Epstein, Mikhail

Title The Irony of the Ideal : Paradoxes of Russian Literature
Published Brighton, MA : Academic Studies Press, 2017

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Description 1 online resource (456 pages)
Series Ars Rossica Ser
Ars Rossica Ser
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Translator's Note -- Introduction -- Part I: The Titanic and the Demonic: Faust's Heirs -- 1. Faust and Peter on the Seashore: From Goethe to Pushkin -- 2. The Bronze Horseman and the Golden Fish: Pushkin's Fairy Tale-Poem -- 3. The Motherland-Witch: The Irony of Style in Nikolai Gogol -- Part II: The Great in the Little: Bashmachkin's Offspring -- 1. The Saintly Scribe: Akaky Bashmachkin and Prince Myshkin -- 2. The Figure of Repetition: The Philosopher Nikolai Fedorov and His Literary Prototypes -- 3. The Little Man in a Case: The Bashmachkin-Belikov Syndrome -- Part III: The Irony of Harmony -- 1. Childhood and the Myth of Harmony -- 2. The Defamiliarization of Lev Tolstoy -- 3. Soviet Heroics and the Oedipus Complex -- Part IV: Being as Nothingness -- 1. A Farewell to Objects, or, the Nabokovian in Nabokov -- 2. The Secret of Being and Nonbeing in Vladimir Nabokov -- 3. Andrei Platonov between Nonbeing and Resurrection -- 4. Dream and Battle: Oblomov, Korchagin, Kopenkin -- Part V: The Silence of the Word -- 1. Language and Silence as Forms of Being -- 2. The Ideology and Magic of the Word: Anton Chekhov, Daniil Kharms, and Vladimir Sorokin -- 3. The Russian Code of Silence: Politics and Mysticism -- Part VI: Madness and Reason -- 1. Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method: Poets and Philosophers -- 2. Poetry as Ecstasy and as Interpretation: Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandel'shtam -- 3. The Lyric of Idiotic Reason: Folkloric Philosophy in Dmitrii Prigov -- The Cyclical Development of Russian Literature -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Index of Subjects -- Index of Names
Summary Explores the most tormenting problems of Russian literature in provocative engagements with its major authors, from Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky to Nabokov, Platonov and post-Soviet postmodernists. Focuses on the ironies and paradoxes that transform sublime ideals into their opposites and trigger the forces of evil and self-destruction
Notes Print version record
Subject Russian literature -- History and criticism
Paradox in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM / Russian & Former Soviet Union.
Paradox in literature
Russian literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781618116338
1618116339