A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections

A sweeping journey through a thousand years of Russian letters, from medieval chronicles to the twilight of the tsars. Hapgood, one of the earliest serious American scholars of Russian literature, assembled this volume not as an outsider looking in, but as a diligent interpreter of how Russian critics understood their own literary heritage. The book opens in the ancient world of Prince Vladimir and the introduction of Christianity, moves through the luminous religious texts and the work of chroniclers like Nestor, and traces the folk tales and epic byliny that gave rise to Russia's great novelistic tradition. This is scholarship from a vanished era, written before the Soviet era erased so much of what it surveys, lending it the poignant quality of a portrait of a world that no longer exists. For readers willing to venture beyond the familiar Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it offers something rarer: the sense of discovering a vast, unfamiliar continent of literature, one shaped by Orthodox spirituality, by the vastness of the steppes, and by a cultural identity that has always faced West and East simultaneously.