Book Smart

Gary Rosenshield, professor of Slavic languages and literature, “Pushkin and the Genres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833,” UW Press, 2003.

Ancient Greece saw insanity as divine punishment or the source of truths unattainable by any other means. In three of his masterpieces, Russian poet and novelist Alexander Pushkin explored the dual sides of madness long before any other writer in Russian.

“Originally I intended to write a book on madness in all of 19th century Russian literature,” Rosenshield says. “To do that, I had to go back to the beginning, which is Pushkin. The subject matter was so interesting that I never got beyond Pushkin. He is Russia’s greatest poet, her Shakespeare.”

Rosenshield paints a far different literary portrait of Pushkin than the one to which scholars usually subscribe.

“Russians often see Pushkin as the epitome of reason, balance, harmony and light. However I found that it was invariably madness that gave Pushkin the opportunity, one might say the cover, to explore and develop the more romantic, irrational and transgressional aspects of personal, social and political life,” he says.

In Pushkin, madness almost becomes a character rather than a condition, Rosenshield says.

“In ‘The Bronze Horse,’ Pushkin’s epic masterpiece, the hero’s madness draws all the participants, animate and inanimate, into his mad world: the city of St. Petersburg, the river Neva, a monument to Peter the Great, the historical Peter and even the Petrine philosophy upon which the modern Russian state was founded,” he says.

Fall will see the publication of Rosenshield’s “Western Law and Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Law and the Jury Trial” by UW Press.

— Barbara Wolff

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, professor and associate chair, Slavic languages and literature, “Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, The Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church,” UW Press, 2004.

“Doubly Chosen” provides the first detailed study of a cultural and religious phenomenon in post-Stalinist Russia: the conversion of thousands of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity, in the 1960s and the 1980s, time periods that correspond to the decades before and after the exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union.

Kornblatt contends that the choice of baptism into the church was an act of moral courage in the face of Soviet persecution, motivated by solidarity with the values espoused by Russian Christian dissidents and intellectuals. Kornblatt shows that these converts to Russian Orthdoxy began to experience their Jewishness in a new and positive way.

Working primarily from oral interviews conducted in Russia, Israel and the United States, Kornblatt underscores the conditions of Soviet life that spurred these conversions: the virtual elimination of Judaism as a viable, widely practiced religion; the transformation of the Jewish community from a religious one to an ethnic one; a longing for spiritual values; and the forging of a new Jewish identity within the context of the Soviet dissident movement.

Kornblatt, who is also associate dean for arts and humanities, will read from her work at Borders West, 3750 University Ave., on Monday, May 3, at 7 p.m.