In the School of Poetic Word: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is a world-renowned scholar, philologist, and cultural theorist, whose works have been translated into major European languages. His legacy is extraordinarily vast, comprising about eight hundred scholarly and popular science articles and books. The collection "In the School of Poetic Word" (1988), presented for the attention of readers, reflects the author's many years of work on a course in the history of Russian literature of the first half of the 19th century. The book is based on lectures that Y. M. Lotman delivered to students of Russian studies for many years. The author's focus is on the leading figures of Russian literature: Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol, as well as their most significant works. Teaching the reader to understand, feel, and love literature is the three main tasks that, in Lotman's view, a teacher of literature should set for themselves. These tasks determined the three types of articles included in the collection. In addition to deep analysis of ideas and exploration of the artistic fabric of the work, its style, Lotman strives to give a complex, vivid, "non-ceremonial" portrait of the author, capable of evoking a soulful response from the reader, so that they can feel the personality of the writer standing behind the book, "his fate, his joys, and his sufferings."