Russian & Former Soviet Union

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...

In this original and timely assessment of cultural expressions of paranoia in contemporary Russia, Eliot Borenstein samples popular fiction, movies, television shows, public political pronouncements, internet discussions, blogs, and religious tracts to...

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,...

How Women Must Write studies how women who write poems were invented in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia by women poets themselves, readers who derived poets of their own design from women's poems, and male poets who fabricated women...

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...

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...

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,...

As an epoch of "censorship terror" drew to a close with the death of Nicholas I and the end of the Crimean War, Russian intellectuals had begun expressing their desires for political, philosophical, and religious reform through passionate debates over...

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...

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), a writer of world renown, grew up in a culturally refined family with diverse interests. Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich (1870-1922), was a distinguished jurist and statesman at the turn of the twentieth century. He...

Although understudied in the West, Iurii Trifonov was a canonical Soviet author whose lifetime spanned nearly the whole of the USSR's history and who embodied many of its contradictions. The son of a Bolshevik murdered on Stalin's orders, he wrote his...

Plot elements such as adventure, travel to far-flung regions, the criminal underworld, and embezzlement schemes are not usually associated with Soviet literature, yet an entire body of work produced between the October Revolution and the Stalinist Great...

Anton Chekhov's representations of children have generally remained on the periphery of scholarly attention. Yet his stories about children, which focus on communication and the emergence of personhood, also illuminate the process by which the author...

This Casebook is a collection of interpretations of Crime and Punishment. The selection not only reflects earlier work by major critics in the field, but also more recent studies. At the same time the choice of critical approaches has been made on the...

A deeply researched account of Joseph Brodsky’s evolution in English as a self-translator and a poet in translation Joseph Brodsky’s translations of his own Russian-language poems into English “new originals” have been criticized for their...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780810113114Author I.P. FooteFormat PaperbackPage Count 159Imprint Northwestern University PressPublisher Northwestern University Press

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...

Sex in Public examines the ideological poetics and the rhetoric of power in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, a period of anxiety over the historical legitimacy of Soviet ideology and Bolshevik power. Drawing on a wide range of soruces-Party Congress...

Treating Sholokhov's art and life against the Soviet political background, the author considers the episodes in his life that influenced his writing and then shows how one-sided commitment to party ideology led to his creative deterioration. Originally...

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...

In the eighteenth century, as modern forms of literature began to emerge in Russia, most of the writers producing it were members of the nobility. But their literary pursuits competed with strictly enforced obligations to imperial state service. Unique...

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Belknap grew out of a conference in honor of Robert Belknap, an outstanding teacher and scholar. The collected essays present concrete strategies for teaching the works of some...

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...

Confronting Bakhtin's formative reading of Dostoevsky to recover the ways the novelist stokes conflict and engages readers-and to explore the reasons behind his adversarial approach Like so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevsky's...

Recounting the murder of an elderly woman by a student expelled from university, Crime and Punishment is a psychological and political novel that portrays the strains on Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its protagonist,...

Late nineteenth-century Russia witnessed a revival of the dithyramb, a poetic form of verse and dance that ancient Greeks performed to summon Dionysus. The Russian Revival of the Dithyramb offers a fascinating recounting of this resurrection and traces...

Economies of Feeling offers new explanations for the fantastical plots of mad or blocked ambition that set the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition in motion. Jillian Porter compares the conceptual history of social ambition in post-Napoleonic...

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...