A "Labyrinth of Linkages" in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History) - Softcover

Browning, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936235471 ISBN 13: 9781936235476

Publisher: Academic Studies Press, 2011

Synopsis

The renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy created a realistic masterpiece in Anna Karenina (1878). In the same work, moreover, he utilized allegory and symbol to an extent and at a level of sophistication unknown in his other works. In Browning’s study, the author identifies and analyzes previously unnoticed or only briefly mentioned “linkages and keystones” found in two highly developed clusters of symbols, arising from Anna’s momentous train ride and peasant nightmares, and of allegories, rooted in Vronsky’s disastrous steeplechase. Within this labyrinth of symbol, allegory and structural patterning lies embedded much of the novel’s most significant meaning. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Russian literature, Tolstoy, symbol, allegory, structuralism, and moral criticism.

About this title

About the Author:

Gary L. Browning (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1974) is Professor Emeritus at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Penguin Group, 1985) and Leveraging Your Russian with Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes (Slavica, 2001).

Review:

"Recent scholarship has by and large taken Tolstoy’s reference to the "labyrinth of linkages" in Anna Karenina to indicate the dense and complicated network of interrelated an mutually illuminating images that create pathways to explicating the novel's many possible meanings. However, a labyrinth in the classical sense in unicursal: one sinuous route leads from the outside into the center. The hermeneutic of Gary L. Browning's book wore closely aligns with this second conception." (Julie W. de Sherbinin, Colby College The Russian Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Academic Studies Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1936235471
• ISBN 13: 9781936235476
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 132