Russian & Former Soviet Union

As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian ÉmigrÉ community has...

Soviet Heroic Poetry in Context discusses key issues surrounding the composition and recording of folklore as well as its often intensely political aspect and its preoccupation with chimerical cultural authority. These issues are dramatically displayed...

In Dostoyevsky's Stalker, we discover how the arts may illuminate psychiatry and psychoanalysis, as well as how these disciplines may elucidate works of literature, art, and cinema. Examining a diversity of authors, artists, historical figures, and...

This book examines the heritage of Victor Shklovsky in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing draw upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world-the United States, Canada, Russia, England,...

This translation of Likhachev's Poetika Drevnerusskoy Literatury (The Poetics of Early Russian Literature), provides a description of the basic themes of early (tenth to seventeenth century) Russian literature. Likhachev compares literary narrative with...

The first book-length study on the subject in any language, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time treats Tolstoy's experience as a massive philosophical and religious project rather than a crisis-laden tragedy. Inessa Medzhibovskaya explains the...

This book reveals the phenomenon in Russian prose in which a male protagonist finds himself perpetuating a cycle of passion, humiliation, and revenge within his relationships with women. By examining the mental and emotional state of the male protagonist...

At a time in Russia's history when poets could be (and sometimes were) killed for a poem, the autobiographies of three prominent poets, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak, became a courageous defense of poetry. The Most Dangerous Art...

This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov's fictional worlds as battlegrounds...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780810127876Author Susan McReynoldsFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint Northwestern University PressPublisher Northwestern University PressWeight(grams)...

Sots-art, the mock use of the Soviet ideological cliches of mass culture, originated in Soviet nonconformist art of the early 1970s. This text examines literary Sots-art on several levels. The book is divided into three parts, the first conceptual, the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780810128552Author Hilary FinkFormat PaperbackPage Count 169Imprint Northwestern University PressPublisher Northwestern University PressWeight(grams)...

The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature studies the development of the Cossack hero and identifies him as part of Russian cultural mythology. Judith Kornblatt explores the power of the myth as a literary image, providing new and challenging readings of...

What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel explores this question through readings of major works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Working at the height of the Russian realist tradition,...

Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov seek to affect the moral imagination of their readers by linking morally laden plots to the ethical questions raised by narrative fiction...

Russia's Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia's industrial revolution. During Russia's first...

This book provides an introduction to Sergei Dovlatov (1941-90) that is closely attentive to the details of his life and work, their place in the history of Soviet society and literature, and of emigre culture during this turbulent period. A journalist,...

In this text, essayist George R. Clay offers a fresh perspective and analysis of one of the world's greatest novels. By examining Tolstoy's techniques and analysing the structure of ""War and Peace"", Clay leads the reader to its meaning, deriving the...

Written in an incantatory style, the novel traverses the entire history of Russia, from its violent conversion to Christianity on to the 21st century where people are segregated according to blood type. "It's true hero is its language, which, even in...

Co-authored by Russian, Ukrainian, and American critics, Dialogues/Dialogi is the first fully collaborative and comparative study of American and (ex)Soviet women writers. Truly a dialogue, the book juxtaposes fiction by American and Soviet women from...

The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely...

"That science-fiction future in which technology would make everything very good-or very bad-has not yet arrived. From our vantage point at least, no age appears to have had a deeper faith in the inevitability and imminence of such a total technological...

An exploration of Russian realist fiction reveals a preoccupation with the absolutist state. The nineteenth-century novel is generally assumed to owe its basic social imaginaries to the ideologies, institutions, and practices of modern civil society. In...

An exploration of Russian realist fiction reveals a preoccupation with the absolutist state. The nineteenth-century novel is generally assumed to owe its basic social imaginaries to the ideologies, institutions, and practices of modern civil society. In...

Focusing primarily on the close study of literary works presented in the broad cultural and historical context, Jacob's Ladder discusses the reflection of kabbalistic allegory in Russian literature and provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of the...

The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely...

Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Gambler is one of the most profound literary works to treat the phenomenon of gambling with a remarkable depth of psychological analysis and a wide-ranging cultural and philosophical exploration of obsessive behavior, from...

Napoleon today is still a figure who fascinates both his admirers and detractors because of his seminal role in European history at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, straddling the French Revolution and the enormous...

Reading Darwin in Imperial Russia: Literature and Ideas expands upon the cataloging efforts of earlier scholarship on Darwin's reception in Russia to analyze the rich cultural context and vital historical background of writings inspired by the arrival of...

Tamizdat offers a new perspective on the history of the Cold War by exploring the story of the contraband manuscripts sent from the USSR to the West. A word that means publishing "over there," tamizdat manuscripts were rejected, censored, or never...

This book aims to examine the heritage of Victor Shklovsky in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, we drew upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world - USA, Canada, Russia, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Norway, and...

This book examines the theoretical devices of 'Yugoslav' and 'post-Yugoslav' literature. The author analyzes selected literary examples from the region through the lens of a contemporary post-Deleuzean philosophy of time, extricating discussions of...

Although considerable attention has been given to dissident Soviet writers who have been exiled or driven underground, the officially published works of soviet writers are almost unknown in the West. This book concentrates on those writers who have...

One of the great writers of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine before he was lionized and canonized in Russia. The ambiguities within his subversive, ironic works are matched by those that surround the debate over his...

This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas-political,...

At the turn of the century, there appeared in the Western world a stream of literary and dramatic works that confused their audiences to an unprecedented degree. Using five early 20th-century Russian plays, Kot examines the techniques, devices and...

For the past 150 years, critics have referred to 'the Gogol problem', by which they mean their inability to account for a life and work that are puzzling, often opaque, yet have proved consistently fascinating to generations of readers. This book...

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought about radical changes in the Russian literary world. With the state's relinquishment of control over literary production, writers acquired freedom of expression and publication. State publishing houses, now...

Erika Haber's analysis of the interplay between literature and culture in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s breaks new ground not only in our understanding of this relationship, but also in our appreciation of the literary genre popularized at that...

The heritage of medieval hagiography, the diverse and voluminous literature devoted to saints, was much more important in nineteenth-century Russia than is often recognized. Although scholars have treated examples of the influence of hagiographic writing...