All the Same the Words Don't Go Away brings together twenty-five years of essays and reviews, linked loosely by three themes. The first explores the legacy of Mikhail Bakhtin: his ideas of dialogue and carnival, and the debates ignited by each. The second delves into three "master workers" of the Russian tradition: Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. In this section, emphasis is comparative: the riddle of Pushkin's life, why "Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky,"...