Text Counter Text

Literature thrives on re-reading, and Russian literary history has been particularly rich in instances of later writers re-reading and interpreting earlier ones. This text participates in this ongoing cultural process by proposing interpretations of a number of familiar and lesser-known texts by such authors as Tolstoy, Zoshchenko, Pushkin, Brodsky, Limonov and Pasternak. Two distinct but cognate themes run throughout the book: a theoretical exploration of intertextuality - the way in which texts gain meaning by internal references to other texts - and a historical study of literary connections in Russian literature.