Available for the first time in English, a leading literary thinker's masterwork, Valery Podoroga was one of his generation's most important thinkers. In this first volume of his magnum opus, Mimesis, he gives a panoramic view of Russian writing, centering on the work of Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Andrei Bely. These are the pioneers of an 'other literature', a new form of mimesis or vision of the world, in opposition to imperial and national myths. Podoroga develops and elaborates his analytic anthropological approach to these authors to startling effect, excavating the identities and forms of Russian literature and society. He places an emphasis on how a literary work is a process of world building: creating an internal Active world while reflecting the outer one in which it was produced and on which it exercises a force for change. Finally, the literary work has an ability to exist in a time other than its own, a time where it does not have a contemporary reader or an author who exercises his will, but where it nonetheless continues to mean something outside of the temporal constraints of an individual life. Book jacket.