Russian & Former Soviet Union

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...

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...

Late Imperial Russia's revolution in literacy touched nearly every aspect of daily life and culture, from social mobility and national identity to the sensibilities and projects of the country's greatest writers. Within a few decades, a ragtag assembly...

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...

Paolo Mancosu continues an investigation he began in his 2013 book Inside the Zhivago Storm, which the New York Book Review of Books described as "a tour de force of literary detection worthy of a scholarly Sherlock Holmes". In this book Mancosu extends...

The Institutions of Russian Modernism illuminates the key role of Symbolism as the earliest form of modernism in Russia, emerging seemingly ex nihilo at the end of the nineteenth century. Combining book history, periodical studies, and reception theory,...

Out of Russia is the first scholarly work to focus on a group of writers who, over the past decade, have formed a distinct phenomenon: immigrants with cultural and linguistic roots in Russia who have chosen to write in the language of their adopted...

Most discussions of sexuality in the work of Dostoevsky have been framed in Freudian terms. But Dostoevsky himself wrote from a decidedly pre-Freudian perspective. By looking at the views of human sexual development that were available in Dostoevsky's...

Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a...

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 Russian culture, the archetypal mother is noble and self-sacrificing. In Women with a Thirst for Destruction, however, Jenny Kaminer shows how this image is destabilized during periods of dramatic rupture in Russian society, examining in detail the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780810110090Author Fusso.Format HardbackPage Count 291Imprint Northwestern University PressPublisher Northwestern University PressWeight(grams) 600g

A prolific director, actor and writer, Vasilii Shukshin (1929-74) reached more Soviets in more media than perhaps any other artist in the post-Stalinist USSR. This study of Shukshin and his work is therefore a portrait of the culture of Soviet Russia...

Although Tolstoy's fame rests on his novels, he was also a prolific dramatist. This text presents the third and final volume of the complete collection of Tolstoy's plays, translated into English. Volume Three contains plays written during the years...

Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev were among the most acclaimed authors of samizdat, the literature that was self-published in the former Soviet Union in order to evade censorship and prosecution. In Uncensored, Ann Komaromi uses their...

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...

Satire and the fantastic, vital literary genres in the 1920s, are often thought to have fallen victim to the official adoption of socialist realism. Eric Laursen contends that these subversive genres did not just vanish or move underground. Instead, key...

In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessa-as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu-shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the...

Nabokov Upside Down brings together essays that explicitly diverge from conventional topics and points of reference when interpreting a writer whose influence on contemporary literature is unrivaled. Scholars from around the world here read Nabokov in...

Fedor Aleksandrovich Abramov (1920-83) was one of the leading representatives of the Russian village prose movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In this work, scholars from the United States and abroad draw on Abramov's works, his diaries, and his private...

Archetypes from Underground: Notes on the Dostoevskian Self uncovers archetypal imagery in Dostoevsky's stories and novels and argues that archetypes bring a new dimension to our understanding and appreciation of his works. In this interdisciplinary...

In Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison, Steven Shankman reflects on his remarkable experience teaching texts by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vasily Grossman, and Emmanuel Levinas in prison to a mix of university students and inmates. These...

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...

Julia Bekman Chadaga's ambitious study posits that glass - in its uses as a material and as captured in culture - is a key to understanding the evolution of Russian identity from the eighteenth century onward. From the contemporary perspective, it is...

While Dostoevsky's relation to religion is well-trod ground, there exists no comprehensive study of Dostoevsky and Catholicism. Elizabeth Blake's ambitious and learned Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground fills this glaring omission in the scholarship...

Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon, philosopher, journalist, and scholar, was one of the most original and eccentric Pushkinists of Russia's Silver Age. His eclectic critical judgment was highly esteemed by his generation's best poets and critics, and many of...

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...

Argues that twentieth-century adaptations of four of Dostoevsky's works - Sergei Prokofiev's opera The Gambler, Leos Janacek's opera From the Dead House, Akira Kurosawa's film The Idiot, and Adrzej Wajda's drama The Devils - bring to light under...

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 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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780810110526Author A. V DruzhininFormat HardbackPage Count 245Imprint Northwestern University PressPublisher Northwestern University PressWeight(grams) 430g

Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964) and its accompanying Commentary, along with Ada, or Ardor (1969), his densely allusive late Englishlanguage novel, have appeared nearly inscrutable to many interpreters of his work. If not outright...

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 polemical...

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...

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...

This volume contains two concise works by the innovative twentieth-century literary critic Janko Lavrin, offering accessible and thoughtful introductions to the two greatest Russian novelists. It provides a perfect point of access into the often...

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...

Joseph Frank's continuing biography of Dostoevsky is by now recognized as one of the major achievements of this century in this form, and perhaps the best work on the author in any language. During the course of this long-range effort, Frank has also...