Russian & Former Soviet Union

A major reexamination of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov as "literary gamesman," this book systematically shows that behind his ironic manipulation of narrative and his puzzle-like treatment of detail there lies an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a...

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is Russia's greatest poet, a 'founding father' of modern Russian literature, and a major figure in world literature. His poetry and prose changed the course of Russian culture, and his works inspired operas by Musorgsky and...

Vasilii Trediakovsky (1703-69) was one of the eighteenth century poets instrumental in creating a Russian literature based on West European models, yet a striking discrepancy exists between his obvious importance and his notoriously bad reputation among...

Writers have a difficult time making a living in contemporary Russia. Market-driven publishing companies have pushed serious domestic prose to the fringes of their output and few people have money to buy books. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in...

Among Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old-fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment...

Arguing that psychoanalytic method enlarges and enriches the significance of literature by discovering a fundamental unconscious structure governing meaning and form in the literary text, Elizabeth Dalton presents both a new and lucid reformulation of...

Goncharov's novels have been popular in Russia since their publication, and Oblomov, the central character of his most famous novel, has become the prototype of a fat and lazy man. Milton Ehre offers new interpretations of the complex personality of...

What place do Dostoevsky's works occupy in the history of the novel? To answer this question, Michael Holquist focuses on the formal aspects of Dostoevskian narrative. The author argues that the novel is a genre that constantly seeks its own identity: we...

In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,...

Alone of the great Russian novels of the nineteenth-century, Dead Souls has remained almost as profound a mystery to critics as it was when it first appeared. James Woodward disputes the traditional view of Gogol's work, contending that it is not a...

First published in Russian in 1921 and never translated, Andrey Bely's long narrative poem--considered to be one of the great achievements of Russian Modernism--is translated to English here. A poet, critic, philosopher, and novelist, Bely was a leading...

A major reexamination of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov as "literary gamesman," this book systematically shows that behind his ironic manipulation of narrative and his puzzle-like treatment of detail there lies an aesthetic rooted in his...

This study analyzes the biblical Tower of Babel story, a cautionary tale that accounts for the diversity of languages and peoples, in Russian literature and other topographies. The author pursues its linking of language, architecture, and society as well...

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing. Through close textual analysis combined with intellectual biography and literary theory, Nicole Svobodny puts the...

A Woman's Empire explores a new dimension of Russian imperialism: women actively engaged in the process of late imperial expansion. The book investigates how women writers, travellers, and scientists who journeyed to and beyond Central Asia participated...

Die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen den Kreisen der russischen Emigration und der Kultur ihres jeweiligen Gastlandes im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts bilden einen Schwerpunkt der Forschungsarbeit der "Russian Diaspora Research Group". Deren erste...

Andrei Belyi (1880-1934) is generally regarded as the greatest and most influential prose-writer to emerge from the Symbolist movement in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. His early prose `symphonies' and novels are often compared with the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780802060037Author G. S. N. LuckyjFormat PaperbackPage Count 144Imprint University of Toronto PressPublisher University of Toronto PressWeight(grams) 153g

This study of the effect of literature on readers, both as individuals and as members of social groups, focuses on Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, as a model for investigating the aesthetic and social functions of literature. The individual...

This book completes the author's study of the sociology of the literary process in Soviet Russia, begun in The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997). The history of the literary...

In Stalinist Russia, the idealized Soviet man projected an image of strength, virility, and unyielding drive in his desire to build a powerful socialist state. In monuments, posters, and other tools of cultural production, he became the demigod of...

In Resisting Rebellion, Anthony James Joes's discussion of insurgencies ranges across five continents and spans more than two centuries. Analyzing examples from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, he identifies recurrent...

Any reader of Dostoevsky is immediately struck by the importance of religion within the world of his fiction. That said, it is very difficult to locate a coherent set of religious beliefs within Dostoevsky's works, and to argue that the writer embraced...

Investigating the conceptualisation of structure and form within literature, the Russian Formalists affected both the creation of art during the 1920s and 1930s and the development of literary theory as a scientific discipline. Crucial to the...

Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge to Russia's cultural identity. His story has promised national coherence and meant artistic integrity in its seemingly purest form. Irreverent and...

Critical studies of Turgenev have tended to focus on his realistic portrayals of nineteenth-century Russian life and have therefore closely allied Turgenev with the dominant literary movement of that time, Realism. By contrast, this book reveals the...

In 1812, Napoleon launched his fateful invasion of Russia. Five decades later, Leo Tolstoy published War and Peace, a fictional representation of the era that is one of the most celebrated novels in world literature. The novel contains a coherent (though...

No European Devil can claim so long or so political a connection with Russian culture as Milton's Satan. Russian poets came to know him before they heard of Dante, Marlowe, Tasso, or of the devils of the Baroque era. This may explain why Milton's...

First published in Russian in 1921 and never translated, Andrey Bely's long narrative poem--considered to be one of the great achievements of Russian Modernism--is translated to English here. A poet, critic, philosopher, and novelist, Bely was a leading...

The Akunin Project is the first book to study the fiction and popular history of Grigorii Chkhartishvili, one of the most successful writers in post-Soviet Russia. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Chkhartishvili published over sixty...

Pushkin's palaces or Dostoevsky's slums? Many a modern-day visitor to St. Petersburg has one or, more likely, both of these images in mind when setting foot in this stage set-like setting for some of the world's most treasured literary masterpieces. What...

Using structuralist and post-structuralist methods, this book analyzes a selection of influential Russian texts-classical, modernist, and contemporary-as dialogues with earlier works, in the light of new cultural contexts.Book InformationISBN...

This book paints a vivid portrait of Anton Chekhov - a Russian writer whose elusive personality and richly detailed plays have left an indelible imprint upon the world's theatre. Every page reveals the joys and difficulties of his short life, his comic...

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A ground-breaking interpretation of Russian culture from prehistory to the present, dealing with the feminine myth as a central cultural forceA ground-breaking interpretation of Russian culture from prehistory to the present, dealing with the feminine...

Yuri Tynianov was a key figure of Russian Formalism, an intellectual movement in early 20th century Russia that also included Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson. Tynianov developed a groundbreaking conceptualization of literature as a system within-and...

Border Conditions combines history and memory studies with literary and cultural studies to examine lives at the limits of contemporary Europe: Russian speakers living in Latvia. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Latvia's Russian speakers have balanced...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781451644715Author Andrew D KaufmanFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Simon & SchusterPublisher Simon & SchusterWeight(grams) 227gDimensions(mm) 211mm *...

In Dostoevsky as Suicidologist, Amy D. Ronner illustrates how self-homicide in Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction prefigures Emile Durkheim's etiology in Suicide as well as theories of other prominent suicidologists. This book not only fills a lacuna in...

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the...