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).

“This collection of essays is neither a history of Russian literature in disguise nor is it a collection of separate interpretations of great Russian books. Close Encounters is an answer, a new answer to the old question of what to look for in Russian literature. . . For sheer power of convincing argument and didactic knowhow, Close Encounters, I think, can only be compared to the essays of T. S. Eliot. They need no introduction. Try reading any single one of them and you will find yourself reading all of them.” —Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Universität Heidelberg"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“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. Review published in The Russian Review, January 2014 (Vol. 73, No. 1)