Download and Read Mythical Imagination in Historical Fiction Online Book PDF BySaera Yoon Total Download 33 Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. Synopsis The pan-European popularity of the historical novel á la Walter Scott held sway in Russia in the 1820-30s. Curiously, however, Russian literature, despite a number of historical novels, failed to produce works of stature comparable to Scott's, with the exception of Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter . The fact stands out that all three major Russian prose writers of the time (early Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol) tried their hand at the genre. This thesis addresses the understudied issue of the three writers' unsuccessful attempts at the historical novel by investigating what underlies each writer's creative process in transforming historical material into fiction. As Bakhtin argues, genre is a way of seeing and conceptualizing reality and these writers embarked on...