Description: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Belknap grew out of a conference in honor of Robert Belknap, an outstanding teacher and scholar. The collected essays present concrete strategies for teaching the works of some of Russia's best-known writers: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. They address the teaching of these iconic works of Russian literature in different contexts and to different audiences, from undergraduate students reading Russian classics in the context of general education courses to graduate students exploring the larger context of Russian print culture. Most of the essays address teaching in English translation, a few in the original, but all offer useful strategies that can be adopted for teaching to any audience. Contributors include: Robert L. Belknap, Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Ksana Blank, Ellen Chances, Nicholas Dames, Andrew R. Durkin, Jefferson J.A. Gatrall, Svetlana Slavskaya Grenier, Robert Louis Jackson, Liza Knapp, Deborah A. Martinsen, Olga Meerson, Maude Meisel, Robin Feuer Miller, Marcia A. Morris, Gary Saul Morson, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Cathy Popkin, Irina Reyfman, Rebecca Stanton, William Mills Todd III, and Nancy Workman.
Brief description: Deborah A. Martinsen was Associate Dean of Alumni Education and Adjunct Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Past president of the International Dostoevsky Society and former executive secretary of the North American Dostoevsky Society, Martinsen is the author of "Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky's Liars and Narrative Exposure" (Ohio, 2003) and co-editor of "Dostoevsky in Context" (Oxford, 2015).
Review Quotes: "This volume celebrates the career of Columbia University Professor Robert L. Belknap (1929-2014), who trained a generation of teachers and scholars working across North America. The contribution to it by Belknap himself provides a fascinating history of pedagogical experimentation at Columbia during his time there. The twenty-one other contributors to the volume, drawn from his former students, colleagues, and admirers, practice what he preached. The mix of close-reading and contextualization that he and his colleagues promoted and delivered is an inspiration and a challenge for those of us who deal with shorter semesters, fewer teaching hours each week, and undergraduates who cannot read as many pages as he did. . . . In his own essay, Belknap describes his own life's work as "studying and teaching." It seems clear that he regards the two as linked, as indeed they are in all the contributions to this volume. Each essay can be profitably read as both scholarship and pedagogy."--Donna Orwin, University of Toronto "The Russian Review, October 2015, (Vol. 74, No. 4)"