The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is an engaging and accessible guide to Russian writing of the past thousand years.
The volume covers the entire span of Russian literature, from the Middle Ages to the post-Soviet period, and explores all the forms that have made it so famous: poetry, drama and, of course, the Russian novel. A particular emphasis is given to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Russian literature achieved world-wide recognition through the works of writers such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. Covering a range of subjects including women's writing, Russian literary theory, socialist realism and emigre writing, leading international scholars open up the wonderful diversity of Russian literature.
With recommended lists of further reading and an excellent up-to-date general bibliography, The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is the perfect guide for students and general readers alike.

Neil Cornwell is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol. He has edited the Reference Guide to Russian Literature (1998) and is the author of two books on Vladimir Odoevsky, as well as The Literary Fantastic (1990), James Joyce and the Russians (1992) and Vladimir Nabokov (1999).

Notes on contributors, Preface, 1 Introduction: Russian literature - the first thousand years, 2 Old Russian literature and its heritage, 3 Russian literature in the eighteenth century, 4 Folklore and Russian literature, 5 Religious writing in post-Petrine Russia, 6 Pre-revolutionary Russian theatre, 7 Pushkin: from Byron to Shakespeare, 8 The Golden Age of Russian poetry, 9 The classic Russian novel, 10 The superfluous man in Russian literature, 11 Nineteenth-century Russian thought and literature, 12 The Silver Age: Symbolism and Post-Symbolism, 13 Women's writing in Russia, 14 Russian literary theory: from the Formalists to Lotman, 15 Socialist realism in Soviet literature, 16 Experiment and emigration: Russian literature, 1917-1953, 17 Russian poetry since 1945, 18 Post-revolutionary Russian theatre, 19 Thaws, freezes and wakes: Russian literature, 1953-1991, 20 Post-Soviet Russian literature, Bibliography, Index