Legacies of the Stone Guest: The Don Juan Legend in Russian Literature  by the Slavic Department's very own Dr. Alexander Burry offers unique insights on Russia's political, cultural, and social past.

From the University of Wisconsin Press:

"How Pushkin’s fictional libertine had an outsized influence on Russian writers and artists

The story of Don Juan first appeared in writing in seventeenth-century Spain, reaching Russia about a century later. Its real impact, however, was delayed until Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, put his own, unique, and uniquely inspirational, spin on the tale. Published in 1830, The Stone Guest is now recognized, with other Pushkin masterpieces, as part of the Russian literary canon. Alexander Burry traces the influence of Pushkin’s brilliant innovations to the legend, which he shows have proven repeatedly fruitful through successive ages of Russian literature, from the Realist to the Silver Age, Soviet, and contemporary periods. Burry shows that, rather than creating a simple retelling of an originally religious tale about a sinful, consummate seducer, Pushkin offered open-ended scenes, re-envisioned and complicated characters, and new motifs that became recursive and productive parts of Russian literature, in ways that even Pushkin himself could never have predicted."

This work was published under the Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies, with David M. Bethea as Series Editor: (https://uwpress.wisc.edu/series/pushkin.html)  

See more information below regarding this publication and Dr. Burry's other works, including Multi-mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama!

https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/6064.htm 

Alexander Burry is an associate professor of Slavic and East European languages and cultures at The Ohio State University