Силуэты русских писателей, Выпуск 3

Yuly Aykhenvald wrote these portraits of Russian writers in the golden age of Russian literature, and he died as he lived: in literary passion, struck by a tram in Paris while returning from visiting Nabokov, his mind full of thoughts about literature. This collection presents his essays on the great Russian writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but these are not conventional biographies or critical analyses. Aykhenvald saw each writer as an irreducible singularity, a literary personality that could not be reduced to schools, movements, or historical contexts. He sought the essence of their gift, the particular quality of their vision that made them unmistakable. These essays capture something that mere literary history cannot: the living presence of the great Russian authors, rendered with the precision of someone who understood that to write about artists, one must possess an artist's sensibility. For anyone who loves Russian literature, these essays offer a window into how one refined literary consciousness perceived the giants of the Silver Age.