While both Bulgakov and Pasternak share social, national, and cultural concerns, their similarities seem to lie on a deeper, more subtle, level. Their respect for the artist and his/her creative spirit, drive to propagate their beliefs, and individuality far outweigh, in their respective views, the concerns of society and its assumed moral stances and degradation. [...]
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Zamyatin, Babel, Olesha
With the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, strains of naturalism begin to take shape within Russian literature. With this propensity towards deterministic environs, perhaps experiments with new types of fiction that transcend established conventions — a metafiction — is a natural evolutionary step. Zamyatin’s, Babel’s, and Olesha’s works contain naturalistic elements and can [...]
Blok’s “The Stranger”
Alexander Blok’s poem “The Stranger” tests veritas, or reality. It is concerned with reality and peoples’ perceptions of it. These people, or more apropos to the poem, these drunkards, attest “In vino veritas.” Blok’s narrator is convinced by the poem’s end that this subjectivity is his preferred reality. In the world of “reality,” the “putrid [...]
Turgenev’s Romanticism
The most accurate label for Romanticism would seem to be a revolt of the spirit. This revolution exceeded the mind and broke out into a socio-political reality in the form of the French revolution in Europe. This violent and destructive movement, however, does not epitomize the idealism felt by those artists that were labeled the Romantics.
Levin’s Rightness
Levin, in his relations to the other characters in Anna Karenina, seems to exemplify goodness, or at least the potential for righteousness — for Tolstoy. Anna, while, according to Nabokov, was loved by Tolstoy, obviously lacked a certain characteristic, or quality, that kept her from righteousness and led her down the wrong track. Like Anna, [...]
Igor, “Poor Liza,” and Eugene Onegin
The Song of Igor’s Campaign and Karamazin’s “Poor Liza” differ from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in various ways, primarily in subject matter, style, and vision. There are similarities, albeit Igor is separated from the latter two by seven centuries and “Liza” and Onegin only by a score years, they are all modern in light of their [...]