The present project, as may already be apparent from the Preface, grew, largely and eventually, from my preoccupation over a period of time with the fantastic in literature (first primarily Russian and then, increasingly, comparative), which in turn had stemmed from work on Vladimir Odoevsky. This work developed to involve biographical research, criticism and translation. My interest in this originated during my undergraduate years, and grew to a considerable extent from a fascination with the fiction (and the impact) of E.T.A. Hoffmann, and from the discovery (in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library) of a pioneering book...

The artistic story is an acknowledged subgenre of Romantic fiction. The ‘artist’ – usually a poet or writer, sometimes a painter, or occasionally a representative of another art form – is a common enough figure in Romantic literature, with extensions into the Gothic-fantastic, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One has only to think of Bulgakov’s ‘Master’ (in his celebratedThe Master and Margarita). In other, on the whole more mainstream – though often at least equally complex – areas of, for instance, Russian fiction, another obvious figure of some prominence would be Doctor Iurii Zhivago. American campus fiction (without my wishing to reduce...

Among examples in the relatively unusual genre of early works of Russian science fiction are to be found stories by Vladimir Odoevsky.¹ Two works of his are concerned with the impending catastrophic approach of a comet to the Earth. In an early story of just five pages, ‘Two Days in the Life of the Terrestrial Globe’ (Dva dni v zhizni zemnogo shara), written in 1825, Odoevsky starts off in society-tale mode, assumes an air of science fiction, and concludes with a Schellingian aura of benign apocalypse, in a merger of the earthly and the heavenly, the Earth and the Sun.²...

In his collectionRoots of Detection: The Art of Deduction before Sherlock Holmes(1983), Bruce Cassiday provides illustrations of deductive thinking in a crime-solving context from as far back as Herodotus andThe Apocrypha, and on intoThe Arabian Nights. Some commentators have calledOedipus Rex‘the first detective story’ (see Sweeney in Merivale and Sweeney, 1999, 248). Cassiday then reaches relatively modern times, with Voltaire’sZadigand E. T. A. Hoffmann, before continuing through the nineteenth century, with names or works well known and lesser known. Other historians of detection also note Voltaire and add in Godwin’sCaleb Williams...

This fourth and final chapter will attempt to see where the Father Zosima biographical duelling episode ofThe Karamazov Brotherscan take us, when considered along with certain predecessors (episodes from works by Odoevsky and Manzoni), and indeed then some of its successors, with regard to the appearance in fiction of duels, monks and confession. Zosima is, no doubt, as has been remarked, ‘a composite literary image’ (Grigorieff, 1967, 34). Sergei Hackel (1983, 162–4) has proposed Bishop Bienvenu, from Hugo’sLes Misérables, as one ingredient.

Dostoevsky’s last novel,The Karamazov Brothers (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1879– 80), not counting of course...

As a conclusion to this volume, we shall just look briefly at some of the ‘pathways’ within, and to, a fairly recent prizewinning novel, published in 1995 and written by a Russian, Andreï Makine (born in 1957), who writes only in French and has been resident in France since 1987.

A curiously bi-cultural novel, of a pseudo-autobiographical nature,Le Testament français(complete with capitals in the English-translation titular rendering of its original French title) contains at least traces of the pathways explored in the present study. It also includes, of course, striking features of its own, or at least not...