Before They Were Titans

Elizabeth Cheresh Allen received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 1984, where she taught for seven years. Since 1991, Allen has taught at Bryn Mawr College as Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Beyond Realism: Turgenev’s Poetics of Secular Salvation (Stanford UP, 1992) and A Fallen Idol is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transition (Stanford UP, 2007). She is also the editor of The Essential Turgenev (Northwestern UP, 1994) and co-editor of Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson (Northwestern UP, 1995).

“This collection of essays exposes readers to early works, most of them little-known or studied, by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Each work is a radical experiment by these young titans, and each anticipates mature masterpieces while representing a road not taken. The contributors to the volume are all well established scholars of nineteenth-century Russian literature who address the works from new perspectives. It opens and closes with excellent commentary — by its editor Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Caryl Emerson respectively — that knits the volume together.”