Drawing on the prose poetry and criticism of a broad range of Russian writers and critics including Pushkin Turgenev Dostoevsky Tolstoy Chekhov Bakhtin Gorky Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn Close Encounters Essays on Russian Literature explores themes of chance and fate freedom and responsibility beauty and disfiguration and loss and separation as well as concepts of criticism and the moral purpose of art. Through close textual analysis the author offers a view of the unity of form and content in Russian writing and of its unique capacity to disclose the universal in the detail of human experience. With an emphasis on Dostoevsky Close Encounters foregrounds ethical and spiritual concerns of Russian writers and stimulates the reader to pursue his or her own critical exploration of Russian literature.