Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story

Robert C. Hauhart is professor in the department of society and social justice at Saint Martin’s University.Jeff Birkenstein is professor of English at Saint Martin’s University.

• Chapter 1: Calls from Beyond and Within: A Nonhuman Reading of the Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol and Washington Irving, Naruhiko MikadoChapter 2: Empathy and Human Feeling in the Short Stories of O. Henry and Anton Chekhov, Iren Boyarkina Chapter 3: From Poe to James via Dostoevsky: Cognizing Doppelgangers in American and Russian Short Fiction, Irina GolovachevaChapter 4: “Smile and Scream” in the Little Review: Russian Short Fiction and Transatlantic Avantgarde, Maria Krivosheina Chapter 5: The Resonance of Dostoevsky’s “Bobok” in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Sahar J. Al-KeshwanChapter 6: Black in the USSR: Langston Hughes, Ivan Turgenev, and the Radical Potential of the Short Story, Laura RyanChapter 7: Composing Thoughts: Reading Daniil Kharms’s Work in the Light of Short Story Collection Theory, Pedro QueridoChapter 8: Outsiders and Others: Revisiting Richard Wright’s “Underground Man”, Durthy A. Washington Chapter 9: “The Strange and the Commonplace in One”: Spirituality, Mystery,

As this collection of essays so clearly illuminates, when it comes to narrative, especially short narrative, there is more that unites us to the creative Russian mind than divides us. You might not believe that so many writers came out from under Gogol’s overcoat, but this collection will stimulate further consideration of how many writers owe their sophistication and subtlety to Chekhov. Even as the essays accentuate the short story’s unique ability to encourage empathy and depict the lives of marginalized people, they repeatedly remind us that the form’s primary requirement is the demand of close reading. Like the best criticism of the past, these essays will encourage perceptive criticism of the future.