RUS 4301 Survey of Russian Literature

A wide-ranging guide to 273 of the main writers of Russian literature and to 293 of their best known works from the Kievan period to the post-communist writing of the Russian Federation, with a bias towards the 19th and 20th centuries and, to some extent, contemporary writers. The writer entries, alphabetically arranged in a two-column format, are approximately 1000 words long and consist of a biographical sketch plus a list of primary works in chronological order and grouped by genre where applicable, including translations into English, and a selected list of bibliographies and critical studies on the author. Some of the entries are accompanied by essays on individual works of literature.

Terras and his colleagues have prepared a truly unique work that is much more detailed and informative than An Introduction to Russian Language and Literature, ed. by Robert Auty and Dimitri Obolensky (CH, Jan '78), number 2 in the series ``Companion to Russian Studies''; and gives almost as much information as the multivolume Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet Literature, ed. by Harry B. Weber (CH, Jan '78). The signed entries in the Handbook...are mostly long; yet they are succinct and give a clear overview of their subject matter, which they treat most of the time in considerable depth. The Handbook...is especially valuable because of its attention to prerevolutionary movements of the 20th century, e.g., Acmeism or Futurism. Soviet scholars do not give these movements the attention they deserve, though neither do most Western scholars. The Handbook...contains many useful features: Russian names have accent marks, Russian titles have translations, and the entries have extensive and up-to-date bibliographies subdivided into categories like ``Translations,'' or ``Secondary Literature,'' all of which makes the Handbook...equally useful for undergraduates, Slavic scholars, and scholars interested in comparative literature.

The first reference work in any language devoted to Russian women writers, this dictionary systematically covers, in detail, the lives of 448 women who wrote from the period of Catherine the Great to the present. Despite their significant achievements, women writers are generally missing from the canons of Russian literature. The present editorial team individually began the process of uncovering this lost literary heritage over ten years ago. More recently, they joined forces with and enlisted contributions from scholars in North America, Europe, and Russia. Each entry comprises a bio-critical sketch followed by lists of important writings in the original and in translation, archival sources, and major secondary references. Data has been researched worldwide, with biographical information culled from diaries, memoirs, and other primary sources as well as literary histories and reference works. A general bibliography supplements the secondary sources provided with each entry.