Literary Scholarship in Late Imperial Russia (1870s-1917)

Andy Byford here sets himself the task of analyzing the 'professionalization' of literary scholarship during that era [the period from the 1870s through the 1910s]. In part, he provides a correction to the picture put forth in 'Akademicheskie shkoly v russkom literaturovedenii' (1975). Bringing the major academics of those decades to the attention of modern scholars, that collective volume discerned four schools (mythological, cultural-historical, comparative-historical, and psychological), which emerged one after another and to a degree overlapped. Byford first of all points out that the division into schools, while in some ways justified, ultimately presents a somewhat simplified picture and blurs certain similarities among the scholars. His longest chapter pays less attention to schools and instead examines the individual careers of [numerous Russian authors], all of whom made major contributions to the literary scholarship of their day, as well as Aleksandr Potebnia and Aleksandr Veselovskii, both of whom remained influential for subsequent generations... ...Most significantly, though, Byford broadens the scope of his inquiry to take into account the cultural background that led to the emergence and then the establishment of literary scholarship as a significant cultural force within Russia. Thus he pays special attention to the rise of literary studies both within the universities and within learned societies, noting particularly the manner in which various institutions came to mark important, and sometimes not so important, anniversaries as part of their "self-historicizing"... ...Byford has written a thoroughly researched, thoughtfully conceptualized, and highly informative book that will hopefully lead to further interest in the remarkable, yet in many cases still underrecognized, scholarship that emerged just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Barry P. Scherr, Dartmouth College, 'The Russian Review'