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Exploring Russian Literature

Nobel Prize in Literature: Russian Literature Laureats

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1987 was awarded to Joseph Brodsky "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970 was awarded to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1965 was awarded to Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov "for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people."

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1958 was awarded to Boris Leonidovich Pasternak "for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition." Boris Pasternak first accepted the award, but was later caused by the authorities of his country to decline the prize.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1933 was awarded to Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin "for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing."

RT Russian Literature in the 21 Century
The literary secretary of the Russian Booker Committee, Igor Shaitanov, discusses Mikhail Elizarov's The Librarian and the Russian Booker Prize.

Laureates of the Major Contemporary Russian Literary Prizes (the Russian Booker, Andrei Belyi, and Big Book Prizes)

Resources

Kahn, Andrew, Lipovetskii, M. N., Reyfman, Irina, and Sandler, Stephanie. A History of Russian Literature. First ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Stone, Jonathan. Historical Dictionary of Russian Literature. Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2013.

Moser, Charles A. The Cambridge History of Russian Literature. Rev. ed. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Dobrenko, E. A., and Balina, Marina. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-century Russian Literature. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Miller, Robin Feuer, and Jones, Malcolm V. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel. Cambridge Companions to Literature The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Shneidman, N. N. Russian Literature, 1995-2002 on the Threshold of the New Millennium. Canadian Electronic Library. Books Collection. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Barker, Adele Marie, and Gheith, Jehanne M. A History of Women's Writing in Russia. Cambridge, UK : New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820-1992. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.

Hodgson, Katharine, Shelton, Joanne, Smith, Alexandra, and Open Book Publishers. Twentieth-century Russian Poetry : Reinventing the Canon.Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017.

Cornwell, Neil., and Christian, Nicole. Reference Guide to Russian Literature. London: Routledge, 2013.

Cornwell, Neil. The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature. Routledge Companions. London ; New York: Routledge, 2001.

Emerson, Caryl. The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

General

Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 4th ed. Oxford Paperback Reference. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Russian Literary Criticism

Moser, Charles A. Esthetics as Nightmare Russian Literary Theory, 1855-1870. Princeton Legacy Library. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Lemon, Lee T., and Reis, Marion J. Russian Formalist Criticism : Four Essays. Regents Critics Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.

Shklovskiĭ, Viktor, and Sher, Benjamin. Theory of Prose. 1st American ed. Elmwood Park, IL, USA]: [Dalkey Archive Press], 1990.

Ginzburg, Lidiia, and Rosengrant, Judson. On Psychological Prose. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Lotman, IU. M. Analysis of the Poetic Text. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1976.

18th Century

Ram, Harsha. The Imperial Sublime a Russian Poetics of Empire. Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Zhivov, V. M. Language and Culture in Eighteenth-century Russia. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.

Proskurina, V. IU. Creating the Empress : Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II. Ars Rossika. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011.

19th Century

Kahn, Andrew. The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge Companions to Literature The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Bethea, David M. The Superstitious Muse : Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.

Smith, Oliver. Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston, Mass.: Academic Studies Press, 2011.

20th Century

Parts, Lyudmila. The Russian Twentieth-century Short Story : A Critical Companion. Cultural Revolutions. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010.

Grossman, Joan Delaney. Ivan Konevskoi, Wise Child of Russian Symbolism. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010.

Lekmanov, O. A., Retivov, Tatiana, and Fleishman, Lazar. Mandelstam. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010.

Seifrid, Thomas. A Companion to Andrei Platonov's the Foundation Pit. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.

Connolly, Julian W. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Leving, IUrii. Keys to The Gift : A Guide to Nabokov's Novel. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011.

Connolly, Julian W. A Reader's Guide to Nabokov's "Lolita". Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.

Polukhina, Valentina. Brodsky through the Eyes of His Contemporaries. Vol. 1. 2nd Ed., Rev. and Supplemented. ed. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010.

Polukhina, Valentina. Brodsky through the Eyes of His Contemporaries. Vol. 2. 2nd Ed., Rev. and Supplemented. ed. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010.

JSTOR

Online archive of peer reviewed/scholarly journals in all disciplines. Slavic Studies include nineteen journals, including Slavic Review, The Russian Review, etc.

BrowZine

A great new service that allows you to discover, browse, and read top scholarly journals in a fast and easy-to-use Web application. BrowZine delivers electronic academic journals to users’ Web browsers, tablet devices, and smart phones, and aims to improve the discovery and customized viewing of e-journal content. Russian Literature, Essays in Criticism, UO Co Comparative Literature, etc.

American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (ABSEES)

Covers North American scholarship on Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Union. It contains bibliographic records for journal articles, books, book chapters, book reviews, dissertations, and selected government publications.

École Des Hautes études En Sciences Sociales. European Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies = Bibliographie Européenne Des Travaux Sur L'ex-URSS Et L'Europe De L'Est = Europäische Bibliographie Zur Osteuropaforschung., 1990.

This database contains the data of two former EBSEES databases, one for 1991-2000, the other for 2001-2006. The new unified database with about 85.500 titles has been developed by the Berlin State Library in cooperation with the Maison des Sciences de l´Homme, Paris. For the years 1975-1990 EBSEES is available in printed form only. Work on adding records to EBSEES ended in 2007, and no further editing will take place after December 2007. The end date for each country’s contribution varies.

MLA International Bibliography

Indexes critical materials for scholarship in literature, language, linguistics and folklore. Covers essay collections, dissertations, monographs and peer reviewed/scholarly journals.

Lectures from The Arzamas Project on the Classics of Russian Literature

Арзамас о классических русских писателях = Arzamas o klassicheskikh russkikh pisatel'iakh

The Arzamas Project has recorded several series of lectures by Russian literary scholars devoted to the canonical figures of Russian literature. Here you will find series of lectures on Derzhavin, Karamzin, Zhukovskii, Griboedov, Pushkin, (early Lermontov), Lermontov, Gogol', Turgenev, Goncharov, OstrovskiiTiuchev, Fet, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Tolstoy, (the late Tolstoy), DostoevskiiChekhov, Bulgakov, Akhmatova and Pasternak.

Other Lectures from The Arzamas Project

Арзамас о былинах = Arzamas o byliinakh 

In a series of five lectures for the Arzamas Project entitled "The Russian Epic," Nikita Petrov speaks about what a "bylina" is, whether or not Il'ya Muramets really existed, and how Stalin became an epic hero.

Арзамас о Пушкине и его современниках (о дендизме) = Arzamas o Pushkine i ego sovremennikakh (o dendisme)

In a series of 5 lectures for the Arzamas Project, Ol'ga Vainshtein relates how a revolution in male fashion took place in the 19th century and what effects it had.

In a series of 5 lectures for the Arzamas Project, Ol'ga Edelman speaks about what the first Russian Revolutionaries wanted, why they didn't succeed, and what they mean for the history of Russia.
 
The Arzamas Project's Course in 20th Century Russian Literature
 
Six seasons of assorted lectures by Russian literary scholars devoted to the major figures of 20th century Russian authors. Here you will find lectures devoted to Gor'kii (1, 2), Briusov, Ivanov, Blok (1,2), Gumilev, Akhmatova (1,2), Mandelstam (1,2), Esenin (1,2), Maiakovskii (1,2), Khlebnikov, Khodasevich, Zamiatin, Zoshchenko, Babel', Bunin, Pasternak, the brothers Strugatskii, Solzhenitsyn (1,2, 3), Brodskii, Makanin and others.
 
Dmitri Bykov's Lectures on the Classics of Russian Literature from the program "Open Lesson"
 
In these lectures originally recorded for the Series "Otkrytyi yrok" or "Open Lesson," Dmitri Bykov interprets works of classic Russian literature. Here you will find lectures on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Lermontov's Mtsyri, Gogol's Dead Souls, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Goncharov's Oblomov, Nekrasov's Who Lives Well in Russia?, Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Chekhov and Gor'kii, the Silver Age, on Merezhkovskii, Maiakovskii, Esenin, Babel', Bulgakov, Sholokhov, Furmanov, Grin, Aksenov and Trifonov, Tvardovskii, and Solzhenitsyn.
 

Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin tells the story of America and Europe’s love of Russian literature and introduces audiences to a new generation of Russian writers, narrated by Juliet Stephenson with excerpt readings by Stephen Fry. Featured writers include: Dmitry Bykov, Mariam Petrosyan, Zakhar Prilepin, Anna Starobinets, Vladimir Sorokin, and Lyudmila Ulitskaya.
 

FEB: Fundamental'naia elektronnaia biblioteka "Russkaia literatura i fol'klor" FEB-web" is short for The Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature and Folklore, a project instituted in 1995 by the Gorky Institute of World Literature and the Informregistr Center at the Russian Ministry for Communications, and online since July 2002. FEB-web is, first and foremost, a repository of Russian verbal art and the scholarly and other texts vital to understanding it. FEB-web makes the canon of Russian verbal art available free of charge to anyone with internet access. FEB-web is also a unique analytical tool with functional capabilities that allow researchers to approach Russian verbal art in a fundamentally new way. In assembling its collections, FEB-web sustains an unprecedented level of bibliographical and textological precision — these are texts the most demanding researchers can trust. The key concept that makes all this possible is The FEB-web Digital Scholarly Edition (DSE). Each DSE combines an exhaustive collection of primary texts with all the essential secondary literature and bibliographical works you need to do research on a given author, genre, or work (e.g. Pushkin, byliny, or The Lay of Igor's Campaign ). (English language version)

Biblioteka Maksima Moshkova Lib.ru was founded in 1994. It is the most famous Internet library in Runet (Russian Network) which grows on daily basis by adding e-texts of fiction, science fiction and politics, technical documentation and humor, history and poetry, songs and Russian rock, tourism and parachuting, philosophy and esotericism, and many more. (in Russian)

From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse This anthology provides free access to texts of Russian originals and English translations of 200 poems that broadly represent more than 225 years of Russian poetry; 38 detailed resource pages on the various poets containing extensive biographical information, bibliographies, and links; more than 75 previously unavailable archival recordings of poetry performed by Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Esenin, Bunin, and others; over 400 illustrations of authors, monuments, and manuscript versions of many poems.

Literaturnyi mir Rossii: putovoditel' po literaturno-kraevedcheskim internet-resursam This guide to Russian literary-area studies, created by the Russian National Library, contains links to sites on Russian authors, literary museums, links to resources on literary monuments and events, as well as a "literary map" of Russia by region. (in Russian)

Russian Satirical Journals This digital collection represents a subset of the paper holdings of early 20th-century Russian political and satirical journals held in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries in the Department of Special Collections. These journals are, for the most part, representative of political and satirical journals published during the small window of relative press freedom which existed in Russia from the Imperial Decree (Ukaz) on the press issued on November 24th (Old Style), 1905 until new stricter press regulations were issued on March 18th (Old Style), 1906. (online full-text)

Istoricheskie istochniki po otechestvennoi istorii do nachala XVIII v. Historical sources on Russian history before the beginning of the eighteenth century are accessible via Electronic Library of Lomonosov Moscow State University Department of History. This site provides links to a wide assortment of texts from old Russian literature, including several bylinas, the Life of Avvakum, and The Diary of an Unknown Pole. (Old Russian)

Pushinskii dom In this comprehensive website, the Pushkin House has provided links to the Pushkin House's own publications on Russian literature. Here you will find monographs, journals, and articles devoted to Russian literature. You will also find indexes, bibliographies, and collections of texts from Pushkin and other Russian authors.

Zhurnal'nyi zal This update of the Russian " thick journals" provides access to a host of Russian journals focusing on literary criticism and theory. Here are articles from journals such as Druzhba narodov, NLO (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie), Novyi zhurnal, Inostrannaia literatura, and others.

The Russian Collections at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress collections from or pertaining to Europe began with the acquisition of Thomas Jefferson's personal library, which contained representative works of European culture in many subjects. Since Jefferson's day, the Library's European collections have grown in size and quality to the point where they can meet the needs of Congress and of the scholarly community in all disciplines. The Library's European collections are among the finest in the world.

These holdings are especially strong in history, literature, and the social sciences. The French, German, and Russian collections, an estimated 3,500,000 volumes, are the strongest among the European collections. European materials are found in the general collection, and in the specialized collections, such as those of the Geography and Map Division, the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, the Music Division, the European Law Division, and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The European Division has custody of one of these special collections--some 35,000 uncataloged Russian books and periodicals in all fields, dating primarily from 1880 to 1945.

Bibliography of Russian Literary Resources at University of Illinois

The Slavic Reference Service handles bibliographic and reference questions in all subject areas connected to Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.  In addition to contacting the Slavic Reference Service directly, researchers can browse our collection of research guides which contain information on vernacular language print and electronic resources for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, see our research guides. Moreover, the reference staff have a blog, which highlights recent online resources they have found useful in answering requests.

Slavic / Eastern Europe / Eurasia Studies at University of Chicago

Research Guide includes Russian & Soviet Literature providing references to literary archives, digital texts, emigre literature, etc. and a compilation of sources dedicated to Russian Women Authors: Anthologies, Memoirs, Diaries, Correspondence, Prose, and Poetry

Slavic and Eurasian Research Guides by Subject at University of Kansas

Slavic Languages and Literature Guide includes Russian Literature: researching prose, poetry, drama, etc. that focuses on foundational books and e-resources for the study of Russian literature and South Slavic literature.  The left column presents the three most important English-language encyclopedias of Russian literature, three major histories of Russian literatures, followed by a long list of specialized Russian-language dictionaries and encyclopedias about Russian literature.  The center column identifies important digital libraries of Russian texts, followed by two sources web-resources about contemporary Russian literary milieu, and a list of Russian online literary journals.

 

Acknowledgements

Compiled by Heghine Hakobyan, UO Slavic Librarian and Peter Orte, PhD in Comparative Literature, UO REEES Graduate Teaching Fellow