Chloë Kitzinger (Associate Professor of Slavic Languages) has co-edited a new volume, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism: A Reader (Amherst College Press), alongside Lindsay Ceballos (Lafayette College) and D. Brian Kim (University of Pennsylvania).

The volume examines the reception of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky in the work of Russia’s most prominent Symbolist writers and thinkers. The volume includes translations of writings by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Vasily Rozanov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and other major figures of Russian modernism. These essays – many of them previously unavailable in English – helped shape, and continue to inform, the literary reputations of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The book is the latest entry in the Studies of the Harriman Institute series. It is open access and available to read online now.

Readers will discover threads that extend toward writers from Sigmund Freud and J. M. Coetzee to Virginia Woolf and Mikhail Bakhtin. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism will appeal to students encountering Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels for the first time and to scholars of literary history and theory. This volume fills a longstanding gap in the study of Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s novels and provides English-speaking readers with a missing key to the absorbing—and ongoing—story of their reception.