Handbook of Russian Literature edited by Victor Terras (Yale: $35; 558 pp.)

Blurbs tend to overstate their case. Not so in this instance. The “Handbook of Russian Literature” is not only “the first encyclopedia of its kind in English, covering 10 centuries of literature and including about 1,000 entries by 106 leading scholars,” it is the finest of its kind that I have seen in any language, including Russian.

Ideological constraints keep even the best-informed and best-intentioned Soviet scholars from undertaking so comprehensive a reference work. The Germans have compiled an excellent “Handbuch,” but only for the Soviet period. Here we have it all, and in a rational, easy-to-use format.

Each author receives a biographical sketch that emerges into a critical treatment of his or her works. The entry ends with references to the standard editions in Russian, recommended translations into English, and a selection of reliable secondary literature. Besides authors, the “Handbook” profiles critics, theoreticians, memoirists (whose output is especially rich in the Russian tradition), publishers, literary journals, literary institutes and literary coteries. But that is only the beginning.

The innovative feature of the “Handbook” is a series of fascinating essays on related topics. Of course they cover the usual isms (romanticism, realism, modernism, etc.), but they go far beyond the usual. These essays make the “Handbook” more than a useful reference guide; they turn it into a good (and instructive) read.

Given the scope of the work and its distinguished editor (Victor Terras is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Brown University and a leading authority in the field of Russian literature), the “Handbook” begs comparison with the Pacesetter in handbooks of this sort, the Oxford Companions to Literature. The Oxford series has no Russian volume, but it does offer companions to French, German and Spanish literatures. The Yale Russian volume is superior in several ways.

For one thing, each Oxford “Companion” is written by one or two hands, the Yale “Handbook” by more than a hundred. What the “Companions” gain in unity, the “Handbook” gains in expertise and vitality. Even more important, the “Companions” assume a knowledge of the language in question (all titles occur only in the original), while the “Handbook” provides English equivalents for any Russian it uses. The contributors have therefore put their material together with the general reader as much as the specialist in mind.

True, the Oxford Companion series has an advantage or two of its own. The historical entries, for example. Under “Thirty-Years War” the “Oxford Companion to German Literature” gives an outline of the events of the war and treats their impact on literature and the works inspired by them; an analogous entry in the “Handbook” on the emancipation of the serfs, the October Revolution, or the Civil War would have been welcome. Then, too, “Companion” readers may miss the fine Oxford paper and typeface. But in the end, the “Handbook” manages to be more generally accessible, more informative, and more interesting.

Now that we have it, we Russophiles, amateur or professional, will wonder how we ever managed without it.