Russian & Former Soviet Union

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...

The fifteen essays in this volume explore the extraordinary range and diversity of the autobiographical mode in twentieth-century Russian literature from various critical perspectives. They will whet the appetite of readers interested in penetrating...

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,...

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

A Stanford University Press classic.Reviews'This is a superb work of scholarship - thoughtful, wide-ranging, and with implications that go far beyond its topic. Tracing Trediakovsky's reputation through the ages - the first time this has been done - the...

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...

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...

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 intuition of a...

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...

Of the thirty volumes in the authoritative Academy edition of Chekhov's collected works, fully twelve are devoted to the writer's letters. This is the first book in English or Russian addressing this substantial-though until now neglected-epistolary...

With the opening of Russian and communist-bloc archives dating from the Soviet-era, there has been a significant increase of scholarly writings pertaining to Joseph Stalin. Widely considered to be among the most influential historical figures of the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783447110259Author Petr BukharkinFormat HardbackPage Count 368Imprint HarrassowitzPublisher HarrassowitzWeight(grams) 852g

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780226873985Author Edward WasiolekFormat PaperbackPage Count 264Imprint University of Chicago PressPublisher The University of Chicago Press