How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy

(University of Wisconsin Press) The author shows how Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy engaged with French literature and culture to define their own positions as Russian writers and create a new national literary tradition. Through close analysis of A Hero of Our Time, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina, Meyer argues that these Russian authors take the French tradition as a thesis, propose an antithesis, and create in their novels a synthesis meant to foster a Russian national tradition. Priscilla Meyer is a Russian professor at Wesleyan University and the author of Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.