Close Encounters

Robert Louis Jackson (PhD University of California) is B.E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, and taught at Yale from 1954 to 2000. He is the author of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Russian Literature (1958); Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of his Philosophy of Art (1966); The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (1981); and Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions (1993).

“Demonstrating a broad, yet detailed, knowledge of Russian literature ranging from Alexander Pushkin to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jackson invokes an impressive array of classical and modern European writers, including a significant number of German literati. . . . This collection appeals to a range of audiences with the close engagement of major works by canonical authors being instructive for the undergraduate and with many themes addressing graduate and special interests. . . . [T]he organization of these collected essays represents well Jackson’s “binding interest” in aesthetic and “moral-philosophical questions,” as he explores transcendent realities in dialogue with various types of realism, competing artistic expressions of freedom, beauty, and responsibility , and individual choices in light of a shared inevitable final departure.”— Elizabeth Blake, Saint Louis University, Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 58, no. 4 (Winter 2015)“Jackson’s luminous selection of his own critical writings over the past half-century is based overwhelmingly on close reading, immediate contexts, and direct quotation. Get all three right, he seems to suggest, and the literary critic can leap to the artist’s integral worldview in an instant. . . . Will this collection become the Essential or Portable Robert Louis Jackson? Probably not; Jackson has more to write . . . the reader senses in the final two essays that Jackson is on the edge of big new interests: in Goethe, Zhukovsky, Nabokov. This is exactly the sense one wants from essays that stretch over half a century, on some of the greatest writers in the world.”— Caryl Emerson, Princeton University, in The Russian Review, January 2014 (Vol. 73, No. 1)“Serves as an excellent example of lucid, accessible literary criticism that will inform and inspire students at all levels. Highly recommended.”— C. A. Rydel, formerly, Grand Valley State University, in CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, November 2013