The authors of this book explore the origins of the classical Russian novel. Arguing with M. M. Bakhtin's well-known theory, they reveal the epic origins of the novelistic tradition and the desire, inherent in Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, to create a national epic like the Iliad or the Aeneid. The significance of this claim becomes clear through an elegant analysis of Dead Souls, The Brothers Karamazov, Doctor Zhivago, and the memoirs of N. Ya. Mandelstam.