Persisting in Folly

Oliver Ready teaches Russian language and literature at the University of Oxford and is a research fellow at St Antony’s College. While living in Saransk and Moscow in the 1990s, he developed a strong interest in new Russian writing. He has translated books by the contemporary Russian authors Yuri Buida and Vladimir Sharov, and is general editor of the anthology The Ties of Blood: Russian Literature from the 21st Century (2008). His translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was published in Penguin Classics in 2014. Since 2008, he has been consultant editor for Russia and East-Central Europe at the Times Literary Supplement.

• CONTENTS: Fools in Search of an Author (Voinovich’s Chonkin, Shukshin’s chudiki) – In Praise of Folly – From the Underground Man to Dame Folly: The Erasmian irony of Moscow-Petushki – Not to Reason Why: Life against mind in the fiction of Yuz Aleshkovsky (Nikolai Nikolaevich, The Hand) – Wisdom and Stasis in School for Fools – Appraisals of Folly – «The Idiot is You»: Viktor Erofeev’s assault on the cult of folly – Fool outside Christ? Dmitry Galkovsky’s myth of Rozanov-yurodivyi and its precursors (Sinyavsky, Ven. Erofeev et al.) – Continuations and New Directions since 1991 – The Infantility of Viktor Pelevin («The Ontology of Childhood», Omon Ra, Generation «P») – In Search of Maturity: The fool and his brother (Terekhov, Pavlov, Sadulaev, Makanin, Sharov) – The Fool and his Father, and Sometimes her Mother: Intellectual disability and holy foolishness (Buida, Vasilenko and others).

«Any idiot can list idiots, but it takes a steady taxonomical touch to raise the fool to the level of national treasure - to canonize him, or at least wield him like a can-opener on a literature that has so far stayed sealed. Luckily for us, such a touch is exactly what Oliver Ready demonstrates in his new survey, Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013. His invaluable book accomplishes two critical functions, first defining the traditional figure of the Russian fool, and then following him through what remains a largely uncharted region of world literature: late- and post-Soviet Russian fiction.»(Josh Billings, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 2017)Read the full review here«[...] Oliver Ready’s painstaking unravelling of the interaction between individual thought and cultural patterns will be of value to anyone trying to understand the fate of not just the Russian intellectual in recent decades.»(Rajendra A. Chitnis, TLS The Times Literary Supplement April 2018)Read the review here