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

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is a world-renowned scholar, philologist, and cultural historian, whose works have been translated into the main European languages. His legacy is extraordinarily vast, comprising about eight hundred scientific and popular-scientific articles and books. The collection "In the School of Poetic Word" (1988), presented for the readers' attention, reflects the author's many years of work on the course of Russian literature history 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 important 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 a deep analysis of ideas and an exploration of the artistic fabric of the work, its style, Lotman strives to provide a complex, vivid, "non-official" portrait of the author, capable of evoking an emotional response from the reader, so that they can feel the personality of the writer behind the book, "his fate, his joys, and sufferings."