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Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by leading specialists in nineteenth-century Russian literature, give fresh, sophisticated readings to works from the first decade of the literary life of each Russian author--for Dostoevsky, the 1840s; for Tolstoy, the 1850s. Collectively, these essays yield composite portraits of these two artists as young men finding their literary way. At the same time, they show how the early works merit appreciation for themselves, before their authors were Titans Introduction : before they were titans / Elizabeth Cheresh Allen -- Part I : Dostoevsky : works of the 1840s -- Agency, desire, and fate in Poor folk / Lewis Bagby -- Me and my double : selfhood, consciousness, and empathy in The double / Gary Saul Morson -- Husbands and lovers : vaudeville conventions in "Another man's wife," "The jealous husband," and The eternal husband / Susanne Fusso -- Dostoevsky's White nights : memoir of a Petersburg pathology / Dale E. Peterson -- Dostoevsky's orphan text : Netochka Nezvanova / Elizabeth Cheresh Allen -- Part II : Tolstoy : works of the 1850s -- The creative impulse in Childhood : the dangerous beauty of games, lies, betrayal, and art / Robin Feuer Miller -- Fear and loathing in the Caucasus : Tolstoy's "The raid" and Russian journalism / William Mills Todd III and Justin Weir -- Tolstoy's Sevastopol tales : pathos, sermon, protest, and Stowe / Liza Knapp -- On cultivating one's own garden with other people's labor : serfdom in "A landowner's morning" / Anne Lounsbery -- Tolstoy's lessons : pedagogy as salvation / Ilya Vinitsky -- An afterword on the wondrous thickness of first things / Caryl Emerson.
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