ABSTRACT
Russian literary scholarship, a relative newcomer in the American university, has developed somewhat apart from other national literary fields. There are a number of explanations for this differential development, some of them related to the special status of literature in Russian culture, some of them concerned with great power relations that have little to do with literature at all. The striking and irreversible changes in Russian political and literary life over the past decade and the entry of Russia into the “global” postmodern world it had in many ways avoided invite, indeed compel, students of Russian literature to consider a series of new topics as the culture they have studied changes before their eyes.
