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Knut Andreas Grimstad & Ingunn Lunde (eds), Celebrating Creativity: Essays in Honour of Jostein Bortnes. Bergen: University of Bergen, 1997, 350 pp.
THIS IMPRESSIVE FESTSCHRIFT appropriately reflects both the breadth of Professor Bortnes's scholarly expertise and the scale of his international recognition. Twenty-eight contributors from Great Britain, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the USA (one classical scholar, one Scandinavist and one Byzantinologist among them) presented the Russianist from the University of Bergen (Norway) with their essays on Russian folklore, medieval Russian literature, Gogol, Leskov, Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Pasternak and Bakhtin, as well as on other related cultural topics.
Bortnes's many credits include a three-year teaching assignment in Cambridge and the monograph Visions of Glory: Studies in Early Russian Hagiography (1988). He is also significantly responsible for the emergence of a whole generation of promising younger Norwegian Slavists. Two representatives of this generation, with the assistance of the experienced Ursula Phillips (SSEES, University of London), acted as apt and competent editors for the volume under review.
Their own scholarly contributions are also present. In her article `The Rhetoric of Paradox: Cyril of Turov's Sermon on the Taking of Christ's Body from the Cross', Ingunn Lunde (University of Bergen) embarks on an ambitious (and successful)...