Studies providing interesting general ideas about the tradition include Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Russian Literature (1958, reprinted 1981); Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd ed. (1975); Caryl Emerson, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (1986); Gary Saul Morson (ed.), Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies (1986); and Andrew Baruch Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (1994).
Among the useful anthologies of Russian literature are Serge A. Zenkovsky (ed. and trans.), Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, rev. and enlarged ed. (1974), which contains many useful commentaries; Harold B. Segel (ed. and trans.), The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, 2 vol. (1967), with an excellent history in vol. 1 and useful commentaries throughout; George Gibian (ed.), The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader (1993); Clarence Brown (ed.), The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, rev. and updated ed. (1993); Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey (eds.), Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian Literature Under Gorbachev (1990); Helena Goscilo (ed.), Balancing Acts: Contemporary Stories by Russian Women (1989); and Dimitri Obolensky (ed.), The Penguin Book of Russian Verse, rev. ed. (1965, reprinted as The Heritage of Russian Verse, 1976). Gary Saul Morson