Tragic Encounters

Maksim Hanukai is an assistant professor of German, Nordic, and Slavic studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Tragedy in the Balkans2 History as Irony3 Sublime and Grotesque4 Modern TragedyCoda: Death of a PoetNotesBibliographyIndex

Lucidly written and energetically argued, Tragic Encounters attends to significant theoretical questions, compellingly reconstructs important historical moments in Alexander Pushkin’s poetic career, and, most importantly, carefully and brilliantly reinterprets four of Pushkin’s canonical texts. A fine contribution to scholarship on Pushkin, Romanticism, and the tragic mode." - Luba Golburt, author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination"Whenever Pushkin touched a genre or literary tradition, he transformed it—and European Romanticism provided a cornucopia of hybrids to work with. Maksim Hanukai shows how Russia’s healthiest, most resilient poet opened up mind-expanding visions of the tragic. Again we realize Pushkin’s lonely placement among Europe’s great poets: he could work magic on them, they could not read him at all." - Caryl Emerson, Princeton University"“Hanukai’s ambitious book exposes Pushkin's manifold connections not only with contemporary European literature but with intellectual debates and moral concerns that underscored the evolution of the European cultural world during its transition from the late Enlightenment to Romanticism. It establishes Pushkin’s oeuvre as an integral part of early nineteenth-century European culture." - Boris Gasparov, Columbia University"Very highly recommended for the personal reading lists of students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the life and work of Alexander Pushkin." - Midwest Book Review