The two volumes of The Russian Image of Goethe constitute the only study in a Western language on Goethe's reception in Russia. Volume II is a seamless continuation of the earlier book, covering the second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Von Gronicka examines the attitudes toward Goethe and his work of, among others, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, and the Russian symbolists. He draws on the Russian writers' diaries, letters, and essays, quoting from them extensively in faithful translation or felicitous paraphrase. In developing The Russian image of Goethe, von Gronicka traces the course of Russian literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and provides not only a clear idea of how Russian writers viewed Goethe, but an excellent introduction to that literature. Both volumes of The Russian Image of Goethe are of interest to scholars of Russian, German, and comparative literature.

The University of Pennsylvania Press is pleased to reissue in two volumes von Gronicka's study. The first volume discusses the early Russian reaction to Goethe and his work and his effect on Zhukovski (Goethe's translator and interpreter), Pushkin, Lermontov, the Pushkin Pleiade and the Decembrists, the Russian Romanticists, and the Westerners (Stankevich, Belinksi, and Herzen).

The two volumes of The Russian Image of Goethe constitute the only study in a Western language on Goethe's reception in Russia. Volume II is a seamless continuation of the earlier book, covering the second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Von Gronicka examines the attitudes toward Goethe and his work of, among others, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, and the Russian symbolists. He draws on the Russian writers' diaries, letters, and essays, quoting from them extensively in faithful translation or felicitous paraphrase. In developing The Russian image of Goethe, von Gronicka traces the course of Russian literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and provides not only a clear idea of how Russian writers viewed Goethe, but an excellent introduction to that literature. Both volumes of The Russian Image of Goethe are of interest to scholars of Russian, German, and comparative literature.

"My aim is to present Tolstoy's work as he may have understood it himself," writes Donna Orwin. Reconstructing the intellectual and psychic struggles behind the masterpieces of his early and middle age, this major study covers the period during which he wrote The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina. Orwin uses the tools of biography, intellectual and literary history, and textual analysis to explain how Tolstoy's tormented search for moral certainty unfolded, creating fundamental differences among the great novels of the "pre-crisis" period. Distinguished by its historical emphasis, this book demonstrates that the great novelist, who had once seen a fundamental harmony between human conscience and nature's vitality, began eventually to believe in a dangerous rift between the two: during the years discussed here, Tolstoy moved gradually from a celebration of life to instruction about its moral dimensions. Paying special attention to Tolstoy's reading of Rousseau, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and the Russian thinker N. N. Strakhov, Orwin also explores numerous other influences on his thought. In so doing, she shows how his philosophical and emotional conflicts changed form but continued unabated--until, with his religious conversion of 1880, he surrendered his long attempt to make sense of life through art alone.

Catalogs items published from the 1890s through 1986 covering both general topics and 69 writers. The bibliographies of individual writers are divided into sections on translations and on criticism. The translations include collected works, other books, and publications in anthologies and journals.

Essays on Russian poets and dramatists who acted as a bridge from Russia's Golden Age to the Silver Age, which spanned some thirty years and included Symbolism, Decadence and Acmeism and futurism. During the spread of the Russian empire, many of Russia's poets and dramatists saw active service with the Russian army, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Discusses the importation of romanticism into Russian writings, and the debate on how to create their own Romanticism.