This trailblazing book examines two enduring and tightly intertwined trends in modern Russian culture: the central importance of writers in the national imagination and the perennial popularity of The Lives of Remarkable People series and of biography more generally. The first ever comparison of the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet iterations of this best-selling biographical series, this volume fascinatingly shows how stories of writers’ lives—and literary biography as a genre—have transformed in Russia from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. A tour de force of ‘comparative biography,’ it balances historical breadth with meticulous case studies by leading scholars of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Brodsky, and many other authors. This rich and revealing collection is a major addition to Russian literature and culture scholarship and to biography studies.
