Robert Louis Jackson was B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, where he taught from 1954 until his retirement in 2002. Author of six monographs, seven edited volumes, and over a hundred articles, Jackson is best known for his groundbreaking work on the art of Dostoevsky; he is likewise renowned for his extraordinary readings of Chekhov’s work. Jackson wrote extensively on Turgenev and Tolstoy as well, exploring in all his scholarship the moral, religious, and philosophical questions he sensed at the very heart of Russian literature and culture. As one of the architects of Yale’s Slavic Department; as creator and convener of the Annual Yale Slavic Conference; as founder, then president, of both the International Dostoevsky Society and the International Chekhov Society, Jackson contributed palpably to the development of Slavic Languages and Literatures—both the Department and the field that gave him the freedom to work on what mattered to him most, in a way that felt entirely his own.Popkin Cathy :

Cathy Popkin is Jesse and George Siegel Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, and co-editor of Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Belknap. She has also published a range of influential articles on Chekhov and the medical sciences.

“A virtuoso performance by the maestro of Russian literary criticism. This lovingly edited and produced volume, itself a conversation, tells the story of Professor Jackson’s lifelong engagement with the great short-story master. These close readings, many of which will be new even to scholars, focus in on the microscopic elements of a text—the sounds and roots of individual words—and lead from there along inexorable, but previously unnoticed paths to the big questions of justice and faith, good and evil, fate and conscience. Along the way, we realize that Chekhov, too, was in conversation with masters—with the Bible, with Dante, with writers of his time, most notably Dostoevsky, and with others who were to come after. These seemingly disparate essays themselves add up to a majestic, and yet uniquely accessible, body of work. Riches emerge when reader meets text, slows down, and gives it the attention it deserves. It turns out that to understand this, we needed a teacher.”

— Carol Apollonio, Duke University

“Over twenty years ago, Janet Malcolm assessed that Robert Louis Jackson's ‘writing and teaching on the religious subtext in Chekhov's stories have inspired a generation of younger critics.’ With this volume of exquisitely written, penetrating studies—many of which previously appeared in inaccessible venues or in languages other than English, and one that was not quite finished—Jackson's profound influence on the field will endure. In editing Jackson’s work and ushering it to publication, Cathy Popkin has repaid that younger generation's debt, to the benefit of us all.”

— Michael Finke, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign