Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

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.

“This volume celebrates the career of Columbia University Professor Robert L. Belknap (1929-2014), who trained a generation of teachers and scholars working across North America. The contribution to it by Belknap himself provides a fascinating history of pedagogical experimentation at Columbia during his time there. The twenty-one other contributors to the volume, drawn from his former students, colleagues, and admirers, practice what he preached. The mix of close-reading and contextualization that he and his colleagues promoted and delivered is an inspiration and a challenge for those of us who deal with shorter semesters, fewer teaching hours each week, and undergraduates who cannot read as many pages as he did. . . . In his own essay, Belknap describes his own life’s work as “studying and teaching.” It seems clear that he regards the two as linked, as indeed they are in all the contributions to this volume. Each essay can be profitably read as both scholarship and pedagogy.”