INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

Change and difference have become the clichéd watchwords of Slavic studies in recent years. There is surely no need for further cataloguing — whether celebratory or cautionary — of the transformations in the practices and potential of our discipline wrought by the political, social, and economic turmoil of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, not to mention the sweeping changes in interpretive practices within the study of the humanities in Western countries.

A series such as Studies in Russian and European Literature must in large degree be a response to those transformations; it cannot, however, be reduced to their mere product or reflection, and does not set out to impress by superficial novelty. In seeking to promote a comparative approach, with particular emphasis on the ties between Russian and other European literatures, and on the relationship between Western and Eastern European cultures, the series will extend long-established paths of inquiry. There will also be continuity in the embrace it offers theory, to which Russia and Eastern Europe are no strangers.

At the same time, such a venture must recognize that much of what passes for change and difference is all too often nothing more than an exchange of negative for positive which leaves old categorizations and oppositions in place, their valencies inverted by a mechanical operation of a kind characteristic of a world and a system which are supposed to have been discredited. The demise of one conceptual framework and the concomitant vindication of another might well hold out the prospect of rapid and dispiriting ossification. Studies in Russian and European Literature will resist this possibility. Like its global counterpart, literary history has not yet come to an end.

Peter I. Barta
David Shepherd