This book grows out of the 2011 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures at the Columbia University Seminars. In deference to the spirit of interactive intellection those seminars have fostered since the 1940s, I have tried to keep some of the lectures’ oral quality and do without formal notes. The bibliography does include all the works I cite and a number of others that may interest the curious, but it does not pretend to cover the field. When I know of an English translation of one of the works that I cite, I list it in the bibliography even when I used the original and provided my own translation. When many editions or translations exist, I give chapter, scene, or other standard indicators in the text, as such information may be more helpful, though sometimes less precise, than a page number.
I am particularly grateful to the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program, the Bellagio Center, the Kennan Institute at the Smithsonian Institute, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) for providing me with time and resources, sometimes explicitly for this book and sometimes for other undertakings that left their mark on it.
These lectures gestated over many years, while I studied or taught at Princeton, the University of Paris, and Columbia, Leningrad, and Hokkaido Universities, using their libraries and the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Library of Congress, the Lenin (now National) Library in Moscow, several libraries and archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the New York Public Library in those days when its rich and accessible collections made it a world center for Slavic studies. This book carries a deep intellectual debt to all those institutions, as well as to the teachers, colleagues, and students whose words and ideas inform the text.
In somewhat different form, parts of several chapters have appeared in the Slavic Review, the Slavic and East European Journal, Dostoevsky Studies, Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, and a Festschrift for Malcolm Jones published by Cambridge University Press. These articles and a number of conference papers have provoked responses from colleagues which corrected errors, added readings, and made this book a genuinely collective enterprise. Three educational inventions at Columbia—the undergraduate Core Curriculum, the graduate-level Harriman Institute, and the University Seminars for scholars and specialists—added a breadth of disputatious learning to the professional intercourse in the Slavic Department. Finally, Deborah Martinsen read an early version and improved it immensely, while Nancy Workman has edited the final draft, caught errors, clarified confusions, and made it into a proper manuscript. Although I am deeply grateful to many, many colleagues, I claim full personal credit for all the errors and inadequacies in the text.