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When geniuses meet, something extraordinary happens, like lightning produced from colliding clouds, observed Russian poet Alexander Blok. There is perhaps no literary collision more fascinating and deserving of study than the relationship between Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Russia's greatest poet, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), its greatest prose writer. In the twentieth century, Pushkin, \"Russia's Shakespeare,\" became enormously influential, his literary successors universally acknowledging and venerating his achievements. In the nineteenth century, however, it was Dostoevsky more than any other Russian writer who wrestled with Pushkin's legacy as cultural icon and writer. Though he idolized Pushkin in his later years, the younger Dostoevsky exhibited a much more contentious relationship with his eminent precursor. In Challenging the Bard , Gary Rosenshield engages with the critical histories of these two literary titans, illuminating how Dostoevsky reacted to, challenged, adapted, and ultimately transformed the work of his predecessor Pushkin. Focusing primarily on Dostoevsky's works through 1866—including Poor Folk , The Double , Mr. Prokharchin , The Gambler , and Crime and Punishment —Rosenshield observes that the younger writer's way to literary greatness was not around Pushkin, but through him. By examining each literary figure in terms of the other, Rosenshield demonstrates how Dostoevsky both deviates from and honors the work of Pushkin. At its core, Challenging the Bard offers a unique perspective on the poetry of the master, Pushkin, the prose of his successor, Dostoevsky, and the nature of literary influence.

One of the most curious and fascinating cases in Russian culture of Napoleon veneration and the promotion of the idea of the Great Man is that of Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who, among prominent Russian writers, was by far the most captivated by the personality, cult, and deeds of the French emperor, the nineteenth century’s Great Man. In his most enduring work of literary criticism, L. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, published in 1902, Merezhkovsky included several long sections devoted to the portrayal of Napoleon and the Napoleonic idea in War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. Over two decades later, after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, Merezhkovsky, in exile, devoted two books entirely to Napoleon, one focusing on Napoleon’s personality, accomplishments, and historical significance (Napoleon the Man [Napoleon-Chelovek]); the other, the larger one, presenting a chronologically arranged biography (The Life of Napoleon [Zhizn' Napoleona]). They appeared together in book form in 1929. For a Russian writer, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, Merezhkovsky’s infatuation with Napoleon is unusual, if not strange. My goal here is not to illuminate Merezhkovsky’s ideas through his portrayal of Napoleon. His ideas have been well enough examined elsewhere. Nor is it even to show the centrality of the figure of Napoleon to Merezhkovsky’s thought in general or even at the time that he wrote his pieces on Napoleon. Rather, I hope to bring into sharper focus the exact nature of Merezhkovsky’s anomalous ideas about Napoleon in the few works of his in which they are found and to determine their place in the Russian cultural imaginary, first by examining Merezhkovsky’s confrontational engagement with the images of Napoleon of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s in L. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii and then, in the two biographical works specifically devoted to Napoleon in the late 1920s, by presenting his mythic recreation of Napoleon as a reaction to the disillusionment he experienced over the main crises of the early twentieth century—World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in particular. If his early aim was to restore the image of Napoleon, the Great Man, so badly damaged by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, by the 1920s it was to resurrect for the world a Napoleon of mythic and godlike proportions, in which Napoleon figured not only as Great Man, but perhaps the greatest man that would ever exist. It was, in effect, to create a monument to Napoleon aere perennius, a pamiatnik nerukotvornyi.

The historical and mythical Napoleon plays a significant role in Pushkin’s work from his first published poem, “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo” (“Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele,” 1814) to his famous poem about Napoleon of 1830, “The Hero” (“Geroi”). However, the works of the pre-exile period in which Napoleon plays an important role have not received the attention they deserve. Critics have passed over these early poems because they view the image of Napoleon in these works as borrowed, unoriginal, and imitative. But this view overlooks the different function of Napoleon in each of these poems, and, most important, the changing relationship between Napoleon and Alexander which these poems delineate, culminating in the surprising comparison in the ode “Freedom” (“Vol´nost´”) of Alexander to Napoleon as a regicide. I hope to show that the less than enthusiastic eulogy of Alexander—as well as the relatively restrained condemnation of Napoleon—in the first of these poems, “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo,” led Pushkin, in later poems, to compensate for this oversight by creating more derogatory images of Napoleon and more eulogistic images of Alexander. When in “Freedom” Pushkin was under no external constraints, and writing for no occasion, he took a very different direction, using Napoleon not to enhance Alexander as the victor over Napoleon and the liberator of Europe, as in the previous poems, but to post a warning to Alexander about his future actions. Pushkin is not writing in a historical mode in the pre-exile poetry, but his use of the past to make political judgments about the present is already in place. He can employ, for example, the age of Catherine to formulate an implicit critique of Alexander in one poem and to praise him in another. The pre-exile poems are significant not only because of the light they throw on Napoleon and Alexander—and their relationship—but because they are important for understanding the image of Napoleon in Pushkin’s later works, a task that has been undertaken before but needs to be revisited in light of these earlier poems.

Dostoevskii had a life-long love for the book of Job. In his memoirs Dostoevskii's brother, Andrei, recalls that Dostoevskii's first reader was an adaptation of Old and New Testament Bible stories, which included the story of Job. In The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), Father Zosima recalls being spiritually overwhelmed hearing, at the age of eight, the book of Job~being read in church on Great Monday (Strastnyi ponedel'nik). Arma Grigor'evna notes that this passage is based on one of her husband's childhood memories. In June of 1875, Dostoevskii wrote his wife that he was enthusiastically reading, more likely rereading, the book of Job. Here, Rosenshield determines how Jobian theophany informs Dostoevskii's efforts to engage Alesha, Ivan, and Father Zosima in a dialogue about injustice and its relationship to the holiness of the God-created world.

Gary Rosenshield offers a new interpretation of Dostoevsky's greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov . He explores Dostoevsky's critique and exploitation of the jury trial for his own ideological agenda, both in his journalism and his fiction, contextualizing his portrayal of trials and trial participants (lawyers, jurors, defendants, judges) in the political, social, and ideological milieu of his time. Further, the author presents Dostoevsky's critique in terms of the main notions of the critical legal studies movement in the United States, showing how, over one hundred and twenty years ago, Dostoevsky explicitly dealt with the same problems that the law-and-literature movement has been confronting over the past two decades. This book should appeal to anyone with an interest in Russian literature, Russian history and culture, legal studies, law and literature, narratology, or metafiction and literary theory.

Physical pain plays an important but unusual role in the War and Peace. In the pre‐twentieth century literary landmarks in which physical pain figures prominently, pain is closely linked to the idea of justice. In Dante, it is condign justice; in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Dostoevsky, injustice that threatens the national or world order. In Tolstoy, by contrast, pain is much more closely associated with revelation, transformation, and truth. We can see this plainly in the changes that take place, through pain, in the lives of two of the male protagonists, Nikolai Rostov and Andrei Bolkonsky. Pain of course also plays a significant role in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, but I have chosen to focus, at least here, on War and Peace, because War and Peace presents the relation between pain, revelation, and truth in greater detail, over a much longer period of time, and in radically dissimilar characters. What at first Nikolai and Andrei seem to have in common is that their physical pain stems directly from their battle injuries. Nikolai is injured at Schöngrabern in 1805; and Andrei at Austerlitz in 1805 and again at Borodino in 1812. But there are also surprising similarities regarding the effects of pain in their lives, similarities that need to be examined–as well, of course, as dramatic differences–if we are to achieve a better understanding of Tolstoy's use of physical pain as a transformative catalyst. By analyzing Nikolai's and especially Andrei's traumatic injuries and both their short and long‐term effects, I hope to show how Tolstoy employs the shock of excruciating physical pain as a means of leading two of his male protagonists toward spiritual transformation and the revelation of truth.

In his influential study of Tolstoi (Tolstoi in the Sixties, 1930), Boris Eikhenbaum argued against the idea of War and Peace as a unified work of fiction, maintaining that Tolstoi's main focus changed from a family-oriented, anti-historical novel in the first half of the work to a more military-oriented, historical epic in the second half. Eikhenbaum insists that \"it is altogether impossible to speak of this work as a novel written according to a single plan, a single preconceived design. This shift in Tolstoi's focus he attributed to the influence of conservative Slavophile writers and thinkers Mikhail Pogodin and Sergei Urusov.

This book is a study devoted to exploring the use of a Russian version of the Jewish stereotype (the ridiculous Jew) in the works of three of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Rosenshield does not attempt to expose the stereotype-which was self-consciously and unashamedly employed. Rather, he examines how stereotypes are used to further the very different artistic, cultural, and ideological agendas of each writer. What distinguishes this book from others is that it explores the problems that arise when an ethnic stereotype is so fully incorporated into a work of art that it takes on a life of its own, often undermining the intentions of its author as well as many of the defining elements of the stereotype itself. With each these writers, the Jewish stereotype precipitates a literary transformation, taking their work into an uncomfortable space for the author and a challenging one for readers.