When one great author engages another, as Andrei Bely so brilliantly does in Gogol’s Artistry, the result is inevitably a telling portrait of both writers. So it is in Gogol’s Artistry. Translated into English for the first time, this idiosyncratic, exhaustive critical study is as interesting for what it tells us about Bely’s thought and method as it is for its insights into the oeuvre of his literary predecessor. Bely’s argument in this book is that Gogol’s earlier writing should be given more consideration than most critics have granted. Employing what might be called a scientific perspective, Bely considers how often certain colors appear; he diagrams sentences and discusses Gogol’s prose in terms of mathematical equations. The result, as strange and engaging as Bely’s best fiction, is also an innovative, thorough, and remarkably revealing work of criticism.

Wilhelm von Humboldt s writings on language are a mixture of philosophical theorizing about mind and language on the one hand, and on the other hand, specialized studies of the most detailed sort of both the classical languages and languages which only in Humboldt s day were becoming known to European scholars, such as Sanskrit, Chinese, and native north and south American languages. This book endeavors to show that Humboldt s work on language is a coherent system of thought; to recapture and expose the systematic structure of assumption, hypothesis, argument and conclusion; and to assign many of the specific themes in his writing to a place within this structure.

No figure in turn-of-the-century Russia, John Malmstad asserts, better epitomizes the paradoxes of that era than Andrey Bely (1880–1934). Eulogized by Boris Pasternak as "the most remarkable writer of our age" and now widely regarded as the seminal figure in Russian modernism and as one of the major writers of this century, Bely subjected the received standards of truth and value in literature to a penetrating and radical critique. After a long period of suppression under the Stalinist regime, Bely has become the object of growing critical attention in both East and West. Originating in a symposium held in 1984 under the auspices of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University on the fiftieth anniversary of Bely's death, this volume includes ten essays by established scholars of modern Russian literature, including leading Western specialists on Bely. The essays survey Bely's major works in all genres, summarize present research on Bely, reassess critical approaches, and offer fresh interpretations. Analytic summaries of primary works make the essays fully accessible to non-Slavist readers.

Sections devoted to Belyi's greatest novel, Petersburg, and other works, such as The Silver Dove and Dramatic Symphony, analyse Belyi's use of structure and plot, recurrent leitmotifs and related forms of symbolism.

An experiment with language. Is it an object cultivated in poetic laboratories where entry is locked for mere mortals? And what do language scholars think about it? Specialists in language and literature studies interested in linguistic innovation and experimental poetry will find answers to these questions in Vladimir Feshchenko’s book. The study investigates various strategies of radical linguistic creativity in Russian and American experimental writing of the 20th century and explores cases of contemporary ‘language-oriented’ and ‘trans-language’ poetry. It is a comparative examination of two national avant-garde cultures, but also a juxtaposition of the relationships that Russian and American avant-garde poetics had with linguistic ideas of their times. The monograph may serve as a wonderful introduction to the entire field of ‘linguistic poetics of the avant-garde’.