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RUSSIAN LITERATURE
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As somebody who has studied and experienced Russia in many different contexts (as a scholar, author, actor, and businessman in Russia), Professor Andy Kaufman is a passionate believer in the universal relevance of Russian literature. He believes that the work done by teachers of Russian literature is important, not only because Russia is one of the world’s most influential countries, but also because the great Russian books are among the most powerful and enduring works of world literature. The works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and many others are not only enormously entertaining. They also present compelling artistic responses—even antidotes—to the forces of injustice, corruption, and materialism that engulf so much of contemporary life, in Russia and in our own country.
To learn more, click on one of the following links:
Professor Andy Kaufman on the Transcendent Power Great Literature
“I simply cannot deny the fact that when I read Tolstoy's War and Peace or Tiutchev's
"Silentium!," or Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, I, like so many readers, feel
myself in the presence of an almost indefinable experience of sublime and haunting beauty,
which seems somehow to be more perfect than the outside reality it represents.
That presence, I have come to believe, is something called art.”
“I believe that every great work of literature contains a poetic universe that transforms the raw facts of ordinary reality into an extraordinary artistic experience filled with a grandeur and a completeness lacking in the everyday world. The works of Russian literature show us that, in art--and perhaps only in art--life's dualities can be made whole and impurities made perfect.”
“I am persuaded that, while each literary work is produced in a specific socio-historical context, and is influenced by the conditionings and prejudices of its creator, that work--if it is first-rate art--also speaks to universal human truths that transcend time and place.”
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