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 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.

Gronicka gives an admirably concise, learned, and well-documented factual account of Russian literary relations to Goethe. . . . He makes use of unpublished materials and offers rich notes and an admirably complete bibliography.--Comparative Literature Studies

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).

"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.

Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment presents for the first time an examination of this great novel as a work aimed at winning back “target readers”, young contemporary radicals, from Utilitarianism, nihilism, and Utopian Socialism. Dostoevsky framed the battle in the context of the Orthodox Church and oral tradition versus the West. He relied on knowledge of the Gospels as textreceived orally, forcing readers to react emotionally, not rationally, and thus undermining the very basis of his opponents' arguments. Dostoevsky saves Raskol'nikov, underscoring the inadequacy of rational thought and reminding his readers of a heritage discarded at their peril. This volume should be of special interest to secondary and university students, as well as to readers interested in literature, particularly, in Russian literature, and Dostoevsky.