Reflecting trends within the field of Slavic studies over the years, the books in the SRLT series provide perspectives on Russian literature from all periods and genres, as well as its place in the broader culture. The influences of political, social, and artistic movements are explored—socialist realism, Stalinism, the cold war, glasnost, sots-art, Russian minimalism. Writers on whom titles in this series focus include Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Zamyatin, Pasternak, and Nabokov.
Series editors: Caryl Emerson, Gary Saul Morson, William Mills Todd III, Andrew Wachtel, and Justin McCabe Weir.
Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. The Letters and the Law is the first book to frame the conflict between writers and lawyers as a competition for cultural authority.
Russian Formalism is considered the foundational movement of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the school given the current commitment within literary studies to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms.
Anna Schur incorporates sources from philosophy, criminology, psychology, and history to argue that Dostoevsky’s thinking was shaped not only by his Christian ethics but also by the debates on punishment theory and practice unfolding during his lifetime.
In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland shows that Dostoevsky aimed to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting the disintegration caused by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s.
What makes characters seem real? This book explores the ways Tolstoy and Dostoevsky created the illusion of autonomous characters, through techniques that paradoxically hindered the writers’ ambitions for the novel as a genre.
The book advances an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of Vladimir Nabokov, for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to free will.
Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word explores the rich theme of the myth of Orpheus as master narrative for poetic inspiration and creative survival in the life and work of Marina Tsvetaeva.
Word Play focuses on the intertwined fates of children’s literature and underground poetry throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature experimental poets whose unpublished work was not written for children but featured a childlike lyric speaker, diction, form, and humor.
This is the first book-length English-language study of Victor Pelevin, one of the most significant and popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet era. The text explores Pelevin’s sustained reflections on the subversion of freedom.
Silence and the Rest argues that throughout its entire history, Russian poetry can be read as an argument for “verbal skepticism,” positing a long-running dialogue between poets, philosophers, and theorists central to the antiverbal strain of Russian culture.
Reflecting trends within the field of Slavic studies over the years, the books in the SRLT series provide perspectives on Russian literature from all periods and genres, as well as its place in the broader culture. The influences of political, social, and artistic movements are explored—socialist realism, Stalinism, the cold war, glasnost, sots-art, Russian minimalism. Writers on whom titles in this series focus include Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Zamyatin, Pasternak, and Nabokov.
Series editors: Caryl Emerson, Gary Saul Morson, William Mills Todd III, Andrew Wachtel, and Justin McCabe Weir. 
