How do great moments in literary traditions arise from times of intense social and political upheaval? South African Literature's Russian Soul charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world's most renowned non-European literatures. In this book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson demonstrates how Russian writing's "Golden Age" in the troubled nineteenth-century has served as a model for South African writers both during and after apartheid. Exploring these two isolated literary cultures alongside each other, the book challenges the limits of "global" methodologies in contemporary literary studies and outdated models of center-periphery relations to argue for a more locally involved scale of literary enquiry with more truly global horizons. In South African Literature's Russian Soul, Jeanne-Marie Jackson has written what is in many ways the most original and yet the most traditional study of this country's intellectual culture--original because it inspects and reworks the existing frameworks by which we understand the national and international dimensions of the written word, traditional because it does its conceptual work with the old-fashioned virtues of capacious historical learning and microscopic engagement with the details of language and imagination. It is the one book I'll recommend to writers as well as readers who are orienting themselves to this part of the world.