Finkelstein, I. (2018). Hemingway the novelist. The 1920s and 1930s. Moscow: IF ‘Uniserv’. (In Russ.)

Abstract

First published in 1974, the monograph Hemingway the novelist. The 1920s and 1930s by Iosif Finkelstein (1920-1980), a lecturer at the Gorky State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, remains largely relevant many years on. The research is done with the objective of tracing the writer’s evolution from his 1920s early prose to his 1930s novels and to describe their ideological, artistic and poetical aspects. The researcher approaches the task from a very broad perspective, touching on historical, literary, biographical, and intertextual aspects. Far from examining the four novels at the core of this monograph in isolation, the scholar undertakes to analyze a variety of the writer’s smaller prose, journalistic output, and his later works. Finkelstein views Hemingway’s legacy a solid textual continuity, defined by semantic and stylistic coherence. Another valuable aspect is the book’s polemic quality and response to the work of fellow Hemingway scholars.