Richard Freeborn – författare

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook Russian society. Indeed the image of humanity liberated by science from age-old conformities and prejudices is one that can threaten establishments of any political or religious persuasion, and is especially potent in the modern era. This new translation, specially commissioned for the World's Classics, is the first to draw on Turgenev's working manuscript, which only came to light in 1988. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This introduction to the study of the Russian novel demonstrates how the form evolved from imitative beginnings to the point in the 1860s when it reached maturity and established itself as part of the European tradition. Professor Freeborn considers selected novels by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Extended introductory sections to the studies of Dostoyevsk and Tolstoy deal with their earlier works. A final chapter summarises the principal points of contrast between Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, and argues that in certain specific ways, they represent the peaks in the evolution of the form of the Russian novel. Quotations are translated, but key passages are also given in the original. Professor Freeborn treats the novel as a literary form and avoids the overworked formulae on which much historical writing on Russian literature has been based. He is concerned with the literary development of a great form.

Professor Freeborn's book is an attempt to identify and define the evolution of a particular kind of novel in Russian and Soviet literature: the revolutionary novel. This genre is a uniquely Russian phenomenon and one that is of central importance in Russian literature. The study begins with a consideration of Turgenev's masterpiece Fathers and Children and traces the evolution of the revolutionary novel through to its most important development a century later in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the emergence of a dissident literature in the Soviet Union. Professor Freeborn examines the particular phases of the genre's development, and in particular the development after 1917: the early fiction which explored the relationship between revolution and instinct, such as Pil'nyak's The Naked Year; the first attempts at mythmaking in Leonov's The Badgers and Furmanov's Chapayev; the next phase, in which novelists turned to the investigation of ideas, exemplified most notably by Zamyatin's We; the resumption of the classical approach in such works as Olesha's Envy, which explore the interaction between the individual and society. and finally the appearance of the revolutionary epic in Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin, Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don, and Alexey Tolstoy's The Road to Calvary. Professor Freeborn also examines the way this kind of novel has undergone change in response to revolutionary change; and he shows how an important feature of this process has been the implicit assumption that the revolutionary novel is distinguished by its right to pass an objective, independent judgement on revolution and the revolutionary image of man. This is a comprehensive and challenging study of a uniquely Russian tradition of writing, which draws on a great range of novels, many of them little-known in the West. As with other titles in this series all quotations have been translated.

The contributions in this volume, which is part of a series, examine the connection beween literature and ideas in important 19th-century instances. The editor contends that they demonstrate that Russian literature often subverts the ideology to suit its own autonomous needs.