SOURCE: "Old Wine in New Bottles: The Legacy of Lermontov," in Poetica Slavica: Studies in Honour of Zbigniew Folejewski, edited by J. Douglas Clayton and Gunter Schaarschmidt, University of Ottowa Press, 1981, pp. 41-52.

In the following essay, Garrard argues for a reassessment of Lermontov's importance in establishing the novel in nineteenth-century Russian literature.

We have no equivalent for Russian literature of Ian Watt's book The Rise of the Novel, which attempts to shed light on the extrinsic causes, both ideological and socioeconomic, for the appearance and popularity of the novel in eighteenth-century England. Nor does there exist as yet a study that would do justice to the pre-history and early beginnings of the Russian novel from an intrinsic, more narrowly formal perspective—one that might pinpoint the most significant harbingers of what Mirsky refers to as "The Golden Age of the Russian novel" during the reign of Alexander...