For Humanity's Sake

For Humanity's Sake is the first study in English to trace the genealogy of the classic Russian novel, from Pushkin to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky. Lina Steiner demonstrates how these writers' shared concern for individual and national education played a major role in forging a Russian cultural identity.For Humanity's Sake highlights the role of the critic Apollon Grigor'ev, who was first to formulate the difference between Western European and Russian conceptions of national education or Bildung – which he attributed to Russia's special sociopolitical conditions, geographic breadth, and cultural heterogeneity. Steiner also shows how Grigor'ev's cultural vision served as the catalyst for the creative explosion that produced Russia's most famous novels of the 1860s and 1870s. Positing the classic Russian novel as an inheritor of the Enlightenment's key values – including humanity, self-perfection, and cross-cultural communication – For Humanity's Sake offers a unique view of Russian intellectual history and literature.

"Steiner’s extended grasp of ‘dialogism’ on the cultural and psychological level is quite welcome… The overview of the emergence of modern Russian literature and intellectual debate is excellent in its clarity and coherence.", "In this original and wide-ranging intellectual history, Lina Steiner situates Herder’s view of culture at the core of a tradition of personal and national character formation in Russia.", "Steiner demonstrates a genuine understanding of art, as well as thorough professional knowledge of cultural theory and the history of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Especially significant is Steiner’s decision, not only to consider the analyzed novels in terms of their individual literary context, but to immerse each one into the ‘turbulent sea’ of the Golden Age of Russian culture as well.", "[For Humanity’s Sake]’s ideas struck me as important as well as new, and I came away with a sense of a tradition of Russian thought I had not identified as such. As a result, the three novels analyzed, and implicitly many others, acquired a new freshness. It also does not hurt that Steiner writes crisp, lucid prose, free of jargon or clotted syntax. […] We never doubt why a set of facts or interpretations is offered.", "Studies that place Russian intellectual history in both a Russian and non-Russian philosophical context are few and far between. This volume does that and so is an especially welcome and necessary addition to the body of criticism on the Russian nineteenth-century novel."

Lina Steiner is an academic advisor attached to the Chair of Theoretical Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.