This critical analysis of the two great masters of the Russian novel provides detailed plot summaries of the authors' works and draws on references to Homer, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Zola and Henty in order to illustrate the themes. George Steiner has also written "Language and Silence", "The Death of Tragedy", "After Babel", "In Bluebeard's Castle" and "Real Presences - Is There Anything in What We Say?".

Born in Paris in 1929, George Steiner was educated in France, the USA and Britain. After a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol, he joined the editorial staff of The Economist in 1952. In 1956 he was elected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he wrote Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1960) and began The Death of Tragedy (1961). In 1964 he published Anno Domini, a book of three novellas dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War. Language and Silence was published in 1967. His other work includes Proofs and Three Parables, which Faber published in 1992.George Steiner lives in Cambridge, where he has been Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College since 1969. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. He has been awarded the Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1994 he became the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.