Description
The lack of anything in English for students and others dealing fully and adequately with the literature of medieval Russia has long been felt, and in this book the authors have set out to provide such an introduction. The scope of their work covers many different topics and genres - the hagiographies and homiletic literature of the Kievan period; the Military Tales and biographies of the Tatar period; the polemical works of the sixteenth century; the growing eclecticism of the seventeenth, as Russia it-self became more outward looking. Of the many authors and individual works under discussion, too numerous to be treated comprehensively in a single volume, the authors have concentrated on those which seem to them to illustrate most fully the characteristics of a whole period, and have stressed those aspects the historical or socio-political back-ground, stylistic devices - which seem to them of particular importance. Their book provides a helpful and thorough account of the history of Russian culture from the introduction of Christianity in the tenth century to the age of Peter the Great.
