LAUSR

The Covetous Knight, Gogol ’́s Dead Souls and Dostoevskii’s “Mr Prokharchin.” It discusses the broader history of the depiction of the miser from antiquity to modern times, taking in Dante, Hieronymous Bosch, Jean de La Fontaine, Ivan Krylov and Honoré de Balzac, among others, and argues for the miser’s potential as a “metatype,” because “no type is more typical” (110). The reconsideration in this chapter of Gogol ’́s Pliushkin and of Dostoevskii’s petty clerk not just as a miser but as a figure to whom additional typological layers keep being added is very persuasive. Porter’s book succeeds both in terms of its historical and economic insights and of its perceptive reading of some classics of nineteenth-century Russian literature. What it demonstrates most clearly is the undeniable benefit derived by all of these fields thanks to the adoption of a truly interdisciplinary humanities approach to the discussion of literary culture.