Overview

Yuli Aikhenvald was one of the most popular and influential Russian literary critics of the early 1900s. His major book, Silhouettes of Russian Writers, went through six ever-expanding editions. A major presence in Vladimir Nabokov's early career, Aikhenvald has since been neglected by other writers and critics. This collection translates several of Aikhenvald's key essays, making him available to English-speaking readers for the first time. Today's readers will discover in these writings original, impassioned interpretations of major Russian authors and a theoretical vision that grapples with an urgent question in this ""crisis-of-the-humanities"" moment: What is the function of criticism?

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Reviews

“Thanks to editors/translators Tatyana Gershkovich and Stephen H. Blackwell, English-language readers finally have the opportunity to read Yuli Aikhenvald’s under-appreciated Silhouettes of Russian Writers, a gem of early twentieth-century criticism and well known to scholars of the period. Accompanied by an insightful and thorough introduction, this collection offers a judicious sampling of Aikhevald’s writing on questions of literary criticism, philosophical aesthetics, and creativity, not to mention his essays on literary giants Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. The translators capture the vitality of Aikhenvald’s essays, while also providing essential context for his terminology and usage. The volume notably also includes a heartfelt memorial of Aikhenvald by his friend Vladimir Nabokov.” — Justin Weir, Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, Harvard University “Few critics deserve reviving a century later. Aikhenvald certainly does. His work is an imagistic, impressionistic, idealist, romanticist spring shower of aperçus that wafts fresh currents and new scents into the library of contemporary criticism. Like Aikhenvald, Tatyana Gershkovich and Stephen H. Blackwell have both thought intensely about writers and their relation to readers. They present this quiet man of rare independence, integrity, courage, and insight with love and care.” — Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus Brian Boyd, University of Auckland “In the world of literature there are two primary living things: the artist and the artwork.  Both behave like persons.  The critic—or optimal reader—is the third active person in this triad of unique subjects, and a critic’s task is always to release potentials, not to police them.  Such is the reader-response ecology of Yuli Aikhenvald (1872-1928), idealist, aesthetician, editor, and gifted literary portraitist, deported from Bolshevik Russia in 1922 to Berlin (where he befriended the youthful Nabokov).   This wonderful selection of his essays and famed Silhouettes (of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky Tolstoy, Chekhov), meticulously translated and introduced, is a welcome antidote to any era dazzled by ideologies, mechanization, or the impersonal device.   Anticipating Mikhail Bakhtin and Iain McGilchrist, Aikhenvald emerges as an exemplary personalist critic in times of displacement and catastrophe.”   — Caryl Emerson, Princeton University “Yuli Aikhenvald may not be the best known figure in Russian literary and philosophical criticism, but he is among the most rewarding. His critical approach, premised on respect for the intrinsic value of art and artist (and of reader, viewer, listener), offers a very different vision of human creativity than post-modernist ideologies of the “death of the author” and the “end of man.” For him, the living person is at the center of literary and aesthetic experience. These essays, beautifully and expertly presented in this first English edition of his works, richly convey the depth and power of Aikhenvald’s aesthetic imagination.” — Randall A. Poole, College of St. Scholastica “Thanks are due to Tatyana Gershkovich and Stephen Blackwell for bringing Yuli Aikhenvald into English. Aikhenvald was the greatest influence on the young Vladimir Nabokov, and this volume will be required reading for all Nabokov’s students. But Aikhenvald was also the most important heir to the aesthetic criticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In these brilliant essays, Aikhenvald lives deep inside Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, proving himself, as he said Pushkin was, a listener of genius. There, and in the theoretical essays, he delivers fresh insights on a range of literary and cultural subjects, among them work, idleness, and play; seriousness and laughter; man and things; and, above all, the act of reading as an act of creation. He must be read by anyone concerned with the now urgent questions of what it might mean to say the critic is a creator, the creator a critic.” — Thomas Karshan, University of East Anglia

Author Information

Tatyana Gershkovich is the William S. Dietrich Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is the author of Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (Northwestern UP, 2022), and essays published in PMLA, the Slavic and Eastern European Journal, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Paris Review, and other publications. Her scholarship has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Academy in Berlin, and the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. Stephen H. Blackwell teaches Russian literature and language at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has published widely on the works of Vladimir Nabokov, including most recently Nabokov’s Secret Trees (2024), and several prior works on Nabokov’s scientific activities.

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