Lieutenant Kije, Young Vitushishnokov

Lieutenant Kije & Young Vitushishnikov: Two glittering novellas from a Russian master satirize the abuses of eighteenth and nineteenth century Tsarist regimes, none too ubliquely implicating Stalin himself, in full power when both were written. In these works, laughter and despair are inseparable. - Publishers Weekly A leading representative of the astonishing Russian cultural renaissance of the early decades of our century... Tynyanov was one of that rare breed -- a great scholar, a brilliant and original thinker and a great and profound artist, gifted, in addition, with immaculate taste and virtuosity, a marvelous sense of the absurd and a rich capacity for both subtlety and laughter. -- Mirra Ginsburg