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.