Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story

Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story illuminates the importance of the interconnectedness between Russian and American short stories. The reciprocal influence between the two was integral to the development of the short story in each country and of the modern genre.

In Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story, editors Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein have assembled a collection of eighteen original essays written by literary critics from around the globe. Collectively, these critics argue that the reciprocal influence between Russian and American writers is integral to the development of the short story in each country as well as vital to the global status the contemporary short story has attained. This collection provides original analyses of both well-known Russian and American stories as well as some that might be more unfamiliar. Each essay is purposely crafted to display an appreciation of the techniques, subject matter, themes, and approaches that both Russian and American short story writers explored across borders and time. Stories by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Krzhizhanovsky as well as short stories by Washington Irving, Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ursula Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates populate this essential, multivalent collection. Perhaps more important now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, these essays will remind readers how much Russian and American culture share, as well as the extent to which their respective literatures are deeply intertwined.

Chapter 1: Calls from Beyond and Within: A Nonhuman Reading of the Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol and Washington Irving, Naruhiko Mikado

Chapter 2: Empathy and Human Feeling in the Short Stories of O. Henry and Anton Chekhov, Iren Boyarkina

Chapter 3: From Poe to James via Dostoevsky: Cognizing Doppelgangers in American and Russian Short Fiction, Irina Golovacheva

Chapter 4: “Smile and Scream” in the Little Review: Russian Short Fiction and Transatlantic Avantgarde, Maria Krivosheina

Chapter 5: The Resonance of Dostoevsky’s “Bobok” in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Sahar J. Al-Keshwan

Chapter 6: Black in the USSR: Langston Hughes, Ivan Turgenev, and the Radical Potential of the Short Story, Laura Ryan

Chapter 7: Composing Thoughts: Reading Daniil Kharms’s Work in the Light of Short Story Collection Theory, Pedro Querido

Chapter 8: Outsiders and Others: Revisiting Richard Wright’s “Underground Man”, Durthy A. Washington

Chapter 9: “The Strange and the Commonplace in One”: Spirituality, Mystery, and the Personal Quest in the Short Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Anton Chekhov, Frank P. Fury

Chapter 10: Gorky’s Orphans: The Unraveling of Socialist Humanism in Russian and African American Tramp Stories, Kevin Lucas

Chapter 11: Vladimir Nabokov’s American Short Story Surrounded by the Image of Russia: “The Vane Sisters” in Nabokov’s Quartet, Kiyoko Magome

Chapter 12: Existential Quests in the Short Story: Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Bellow’s “Looking for Mr. Green,” and Cheever’s “The Swimmer”, Robert C. Hauhart

Chapter 13: Divine Beings in Short Stories by Nabokov, Garcia Marquez, and Le Guin: A Secular Reading, Anastasia G. Pease

Chapter 14: Two Ladies, Two Dogs: On Moral Luck and Determinism in Chekhov and Oates, Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis

Chapter 15: Food, Influence, the Short Story, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver, Jeff Birkenstein

Chapter 16: Heterosexual Fictions: Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Lucky Issar

Chapter 17: Outsiders, Peasants, and Elderly Exiles in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again, Christine Tachick Kern

Chapter 18: Tiny Haunted Empires: Domestic Fabulism in the Home in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s “Quadraturin” and Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals”, Emrys Donaldson