Robert Louis Jackson

Dostoevsky's Quest for Form

This long awaited collection brings together in one volume the definitive essays on Anton Chekhov by renowned Chekhov scholar Robert Louis Jackson, including work that has never appeared in English as well as brand new essays published here for the first time. The volume offers a series of “slow” readings that yield insight after exquisite insight. They also model fruitful ways of discerning the rich complexity of Chekhov’s deceptively simple work. The volume’s introduction by Robin Feuer Miller captures beautifully what Jackson undertakes in his careful scrutiny of Chekhov’s text. The editor’s afterword by Cathy Popkin includes passages from the editorial correspondence in which Jackson reflects on his work and articulates his aspirations; the authorial voice thus resounds in the section Jackson expected to write himself. The editor also outlines the arguments and insights of Jackson’s remarkable unfinished essays. Finally, an appendix provides the full text of his virtually complete but still open-ended treatment of “On Official Business,” the story Jackson returned to repeatedly for decades, the previously unpublished culmination of his life’s work on Chekhov. Essays on Anton P. Chekhov: Close Readings is fully accessible to readers without knowledge of Russian while also providing complete documentation for scholars in the field.

Close Readings

Essays on Anton P. Chekhov

This book presents modern commentary on a great work of literature by analyzing themes, style, genre, structural elements, artistic influences, and historical background. The essays offer numerous insights into why the Russian novel has provoked such intense reaction.

A Collection of Critical Essays

Twentieth Century Interpretations of Crime and Punishment

Studies on Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground in Russian Literature

The Overwhelming Questions

Dialogues with Dostoevsky

Chekhov [Anton Pavlovič Čechov].

"The purpose of this book is to bring the reader, as vividly and succinctly as possible, the central body of Dostoevsky's aesthetic thought and to reveal its centrality to his world outlook ... --his pronouncements on beauty, the nature of artistic representation of reality, the function of literature, and similar matters--in order to determine and then demonstrate the coherence of this thought."--Preface.

A Study of His Philosophy of Art

V. S. Pritchett has written of Dostoevsky that he "is still the master [because] he moves forward with us as the sense of our danger changes." Nearly a century and a quarter have passed since Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel began to appear in installments in The Russian Herald. The essays in A New Word on "The Brothers Karamazov" show us that Dostoevsky does indeed continue to change with us, and that The Brothers Karamazov is very much a novel of our time. Edited by the nation's most respected senior Dostoevsky scholar, this collection brings together original work by notable writers of varying backgrounds and interests. While drawing on Dostoevsky's other fiction, journalism, and correspondence, the writing of his contemporaries, the state of Russian culture to illuminate the unfolding novel--these essays also make use of new fields of scholarship, such as cognitive psychology, as well as recent theoretical approaches and critical insights. The authors propose readings remarkable for their attentiveness to detail, relatively peripheral characters, and heretofore overlooked incidents, passages, or fragments of dialogue. Some contributors suggest readings so new that they are subvert our usual modes of approaching this novel; all reflect the immediacy of adventuresome, informed encounters with Dostoevsky's final novel. Treating The Brothers Karamazov in terms of a broad range of genres (poetry, narrative, parody, confession, detective fiction) and discourses (medical, scientific, sexual, judicial, philosophical, and theological), these essays embody on a critical and analytic level a search for coherence, meaning, and harmony that continues to animate Dostoevsky's novel in our day.

A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

Gary Saul Morson

Elizabeth Cheresh Allen

Robert Louis Jackson has long been recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the foremost Dostoevsky scholars in the world. Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature collects twenty essays by distinguished scholars (many former students of Jackson's) and admiring colleagues on some of the foremost questions in Russian studies. Whatever the specific topic, these essays manifest a determination to exercise the critical independence and integrity exemplified by Jackson throughout his long career.

Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson

Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature

Discusses the Russian novelist's major works, examines his themes and writing techniques, and assesses Dostoevsky's place in modern literature

New Perspectives

Dostoevsky

This book analyzes the impact of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground (1864) and its protagonist, the Underground Man, upon Russian literature. It is concerned with the different ways in which Russian writers responded to Notes from the Underground, with the whole complex of "underground" psychology, philosophy, and imagery. The basic assumption of this work is that the great impact of Dostoevsky on Russian literature was due not alone to the great power of his art, but to the continuing urgency of the problems he posed in his works. These problems, centering on the relations between the individual and society, have lost none of their relevance today, not only in Russia but also in the West.

Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature

Drawing on the prose, poetry, and criticism of a broad range of Russian writers and critics, including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bakhtin, Gorky, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn, Close Encounters: Essays on Russian Literature explores themes of chance and fate, freedom and responsibility, beauty and disfiguration, and loss and separation, as well as concepts of criticism and the moral purpose of art. Through close textual analysis, the author offers a view of the unity of form and content in Russian writing and of its unique capacity to disclose the universal in the detail of human experience. With an emphasis on Dostoevsky, Close Encounters foregrounds ethical and spiritual concerns of Russian writers and stimulates the reader to pursue his or her own critical exploration of Russian literature. This work will be of interest to academic libraries, university students, and specialists in literature, criticism, philosophy, and esthetics, as well as enthusiastic general readers of Russian literature.

Essays on Russian Literature

Close Encounters

Clear and compelling new readings of Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel.

Robert Louis Jackson

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