Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2017
Abstract
The communication and interrelation between Spanish and Russian literature have lasted for several centuries. At times, the connections grew weaker and at other times stronger, but they never disappeared completely. Throughout this period, which extends roughly from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, there were single instances when the relationship between Spanish and Russian literature was becoming very intense, and we can admit that these interactions were very productive for both sides. The careful study of motives, forms, and all possible aspects of such communication, even if reviewed only in part, can be both revealing and productive for Spanish literary history as well as for Russian.
A historic overview of Spanish-Russian literary relations will give us abundant and interesting material for more concrete literary analysis and for theoretical generalization and conclusions. These materials will show us significant similarities in the process of historical development of two countries that, in spite of being so far apart territorially and culturally, have much in common. In fact, the Spanish-Muslim cultural interrelations in the Middle Ages are in many ways reminiscent of the Mongol Yoke that spread over Russia and lasted for almost three centuries. An understanding of these events then may help us explain later processes that took place in Russia and Spain once Arab and Mongol dominations came to an end, in particular regarding the role of the so-called exotic color in the arts, in the transformation of literary genres, etc.
Recommended Citation
Gratchev, Slav. "Introduction." In The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky, by Slav Gratchev, xi-xxiii. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.
Comments
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