Kružok

Ellen Chances, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, presents her analysis of Andrei Bitov’s: Palace Without a Tsar. She will discuss a chapter of the book that she is finishing about Bitov’s writings. The book is her second book about Bitov’s oeuvre. The first one, Andrei Bitov. The Ecology of Inspiration (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), was the first book in any language about his work. (In 2006, a Russian translation, Андрей Битов. Экология вдохновения [Saint Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2006], came out.) She called Bitov’s writings “ecological prose.” Why? She determined that he wrote an individual story as one independent entity, and it then became linked to works that he later wrote. Thus, he was creating one big ecological organism. Moreover, he spoke, in his works, about ecological issues.

​The current book deals with various aspects of Bitov’s writings, including his final works. (His dates are 1937-2018.) The chapter that she offers you focuses on his 2005 book, Дворец без царя. This Bitov book reflects the “ecological prose” principle that she discussed in The Ecology of Inspiration. Bitov chooses a number of his writings, spanning the time period 1960 to 2003, whose focus is Petersburg, and creates a new book.

​Other topics that her current book addresses include, among others, the importance of Mandelstam for Pushkin House; Bitov and Dostoevsky; Bitov’s novel, Оглашенные (1995) and the ecology of the human being.

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Co-hosted with: Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (OWNER), Slavic Languages & Literatures