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...

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

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...

This study concentrates on The Devils, but also places this novel in the total context of Dostoevsky's work. Also considered is the life and work of T.N. Granovsky, who is satirised along with Turgenev in the novel, and thus offers a useful basis on...

Dostoevsky's Democracy offers a major reinterpretation of the life and work of the great Russian writer by closely reexamining the crucial transitional period between the early works of the 1840s and the important novels of the 1860s. Sentenced to death...

This is a biography of the poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, written by his son, illustrated with examples of his work and telling in detail the story of his arrest during Stalin's terror, eight years of prison and exile, and stubborn survival. Since his death,...

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 Ergebnisse...

The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach...

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...

A nation's literature serves as a mirror of its social and political life. Ukraine, although stateless for most of the twentieth century, is no different in this regard from other lands. Through decades of tremendous political and social changes,...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781984856036Author George SaundersFormat PaperbackPage Count 432Imprint Random House Trade PaperbacksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams)...

The life of a human community rests on common experience. Yet in modem life there is an experience common to all that threatens the very basis of community -- the experience of exile. No one in the modem world has been spared the encounter with...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The description for this book, Gogol From the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, will be forthcoming.Reviews"In putting together this extremely useful volume, Robert Maguire has pursued a complex set of aims--to illumilnate Gogol's art in ways that must...

Explores the impact of the Russian Revolution and League of Nations on British modernist culture 1917 was the moment in which a new sense of internationalism came into being under the impetus of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the League of...

Adopting the modernist master Vladimir Nabokov as its guide, Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement is an exploration of the radically changing social, historical, technological, and literary culture of the early 20th century, a time when modes of...

Dostoevsky's views on punishment are usually examined through the prism of his Christian commitments. For some, this means an orientation toward mercy; for others, an affirmation of suffering as a path to redemption. Anna Schur incorporates sources from...