Welcome to Russian History Retold.

Episode 292, an interview with Rolfe Helibust, author of how Russian literature became great.

Today we have a special guest joining us on a podcast.

Rolf Helibust is a UK-based scholar currently working with the Brilliant Club University

access charity. He is senior editor of the Journal Club University Access Charity.

He is senior editor of the journal Canadian Slavonic Papers.

He's also the author of how Russian literature became great,

coming out on January 15th, 2024 from Cornell University Press. Welcome to the podcast.

And thank you very, very much for inviting me.

Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, so I think the first thing we're going to ask you is,

what is the book about?

Yes, apologies beforehand for the sweeping presumptuous title if not altogether.

Problematic, I remember that one of the editors at an American University

press where I was shopping the manuscript basically told me you can't use

that adjective post-Trump you know like we couldn't use irony after 9-11 and of course it's

the great one that I'm talking about maybe you'll come back to that later but in any case

what I have in mind in this book is it's not all of Russian literature it is the 19th century classics, what we are most familiar with in the West, Dosteevsky, Tullstoy, Tullstaeevsky, and so on, though I'm not interested in any one of them by themselves only in the larger phenomenon of a national literary tradition.

And not just as a canon of works and authors but as a cultural

met-a-narrative if you will and you know that this whole idea of tradition is

something very weird something we talk about casually or anxiously, usually only so we can express a particular

political attitude towards it without ever thinking what it actually means.

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