The Emergence of a Hero

Andrei Zorin has been Professor and Chair of Russian at the University of Oxford since 2004. His publications include By Fables Alone: Russian Literature and State Ideology of the Last Third of the XVIII - First Third of the XIX centuries (2014), On the Periphery of Europe: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite (with Andreas Schönle, 2018), scholarly editions of Russian classics, and more than 200 articles in English, Russian, French, German, Italian, and Finnish.

• Introduction: Individual experience as a problem of cultural history 1: The emotional culture of the Russian nobility of the second half of the eighteenth century 2: The Prodigal Son (A Youthful Rebellion and the Dramas of Schiller) 3: Three Sisters (Strategies of Love and The New Heloise) 4: The New Abelard (A Thirst for Self-Destruction and The Sorrows of Young Werther) Conclusion

The Emergence of a Hero first appeared in Russian in 2016, and remains every bit as fine a work of scholarship in Leo Shtutin's welcome and accomplished translation. In minute detail and with finesse, Andrei Zorin portrays a precocious talent who grasped at the dawn of the Romantic age that a new type of personality was coming into being - a personality prone to melancholy and disillusionment but also idealistic, inclined to self-sacrifice and capable of delighting in love, friendship, philosophy, music and poetry.