Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Belknap

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Belknap grew out of a conference in honor of Robert Belknap, an outstanding teacher and scholar. The collected essays present concrete strategies for teaching the works of some of Russia’s best-known writers: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. They address the teaching of these iconic works of Russian literature in different contexts and to different audiences, from undergraduate students reading Russian classics in the context of general education courses to graduate students exploring the larger context of Russian print culture. Most of the essays address teaching in English translation, a few in the original, but all offer useful strategies that can be adopted for teaching to any audience. Contributors include: Robert L. Belknap, Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Ksana Blank, Ellen Chances, Nicholas Dames, Andrew R. Durkin, Jefferson J.A. Gatrall, Svetlana Slavskaya Grenier, Robert Louis Jackson, Liza Knapp, Deborah A. Martinsen, Olga Meerson, Maude Meisel, Robin Feuer Miller, Marcia A. Morris, Gary Saul Morson, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Cathy Popkin, Irina Reyfman, Rebecca Stanton, William Mills Todd III, and Nancy Workman.

Robert L. Belknap was Professor Emeritus of Russian at Columbia. He was educated at Princeton University, The University of Paris, Columbia University, and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University, and is the author of The Structure of ’The Brothers Karamazov’ (1967, 1989, in Russian 1997), The Genesis of ’The Brothers Karamazov’ (1990), and other studies of Russian literature and of university education. He has taught courses in general education, literary theory, and Russian and comparative literature.

Deborah A. Martinsen is Dean of Alumni Education at Columbia University, where she teaches courses in the Core Curriculum, the Slavic Department, and the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narratives of Exposure (2003; in Russian 2011) as well as articles on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nabokov. She is the editor of Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (1997; in paper 2010) and is currently co-editing Dostoevsky in Context. She was President of the International Dostoevsky Society from 2007-2013. Cathy Popkin is the Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Russian at Columbia University. She is the author of The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol (1993) and the editor and one of the translators of the new Norton Critical Edition of Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories. She is currently completing a book on the disciplinary practices and documentary forms that shape Chekhov’s narrative prose and continuing an ongoing project on Turgenev and metaphor. Irina Reyfman is Professor of Russian Literature at Columbia University. In her studies, Reyfman focuses on the interaction of literature and culture. Reyfman is the author of Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the ’New’ Russian Literature (1990), Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (1999; in Russian 2002), and Rank and Style: Russians in State Service, Life, and Literature (2012). She is also a co-editor of Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference (2008). She is currently completing a book on the interaction of writing and state service in Russian literature of the imperial period.