Close Encounters Essays on Russian Literature [Hardcover]

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.Demonstrating a broad, yet detailed, knowledge of Russian literature ranging from Alexander Pushkin to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jackson invokes an impressive array of classical and modern European writers, including a significant number of German literati. . . . This collection appeals to a range of audiences with the close engagement of major works by canonical authors being instructive for the undergraduate and with many themes addressing graduate and special interests. . . . [T]he organization of these collected essays represents well Jacksons binding interest in aesthetic and moral-philosophical questions, as he explores transcendent realities in dialogue with various types of realism, competing artistic expressions of freedom, beauty, and responsibility , and individual choices in light of a shared inevitable final departure.Jacksons luminous selection of his own critical writings over the past half-century is based overwhelmingly on close readil3,