Although Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy lived only forty-eight years (1890-1938), he became one of the most influential scholars in the history of linguistics. He is remembered as the author of Principles of Phonology, the foundational text of European linguistic structuralism. Outside a narrow circle of specialists, it is not generally known that, following his emigration from Russia, Trubetzkoy taught Russian literature at the University of Vienna and left a sizable body of work dating from that period. Until now, with a few exception, Trubetzkoy’s studies in literary theory and history have been available only in Russian and German, but not in English. It is this gap that Anatoly Liberman fills with this volume.
The book can be broadly divided into three sections: studies of early Russian literature, in which one of the founders of modern linguistics evidences remarkable skill at more traditional philology; studies of metrics and nineteenth-century Russian poetry, as embodied in the work of Lermontov and Pushkin; and studies of modern Russian literature, primarily Dostoevsky. While each of these areas of study has considerable intrinsic merit, it is the juxtaposition of the three that will prove of special importance to the student of literature.
