This innovative book presents some fundamentally new interpretations of the best-known and best-loved classics of Russian literature. It does so by applying to them the latest Western research on creativity and literary theory. Readers will come away from the book with an enhanced understanding of individual works by classic authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well as of the overall evolution of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

Jim Curtis received his PhD from Columbia University and was professor of Russian literature at the University of Missouri-Columbia for 31 years. He is now Professor Emeritus of Russian. Dr. Curtis is the author of numerous books and essays, including Solzhenitsyn's Traditional Imagination and Stalin's Soviet Monastery.