Russian & Former Soviet Union

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...

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...

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...

This second book in a three-volume work on the young Fyodor Dostoevsky is a diary-portrait of his early years drawn from letters, memoirs, and criticism of the writer, as well as from the testimony and witness of family and friends, readers and...

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...

This anthology introduces readers to Tsarist Russia's emerging popular and commercial urban culture and the individuals and groups that produced and consumed it. The selections translated here illustrate in colorful detail how the experiences and the...

With its demand that works of art be judged according to the their morally didactic content, Tolstoy's reviled aesthetics has seemed to exclude from the canon far too many works widely accepted as masterpieces, including Shakespeare and Beethoven. This...

David Bethea examines the distinctly Russian view of the "end" of history in five major works of modern Russian fiction. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available...

No European Devil can claim so long or so political a connection with Russian culture as Milton's Satan. Russian poets came to know him before they heard of Dante, Marlowe, Tasso, or of the devils of the Baroque era. This may explain why Milton's...

" . . . the first thorough-going feminist study of Russian literature." -The Slavonic Review" . . . a ground-breaking book. . . . Written with verve and wit . . . a pleasure to read." -Slavic ReviewBook InformationISBN 9780253358387Author Barbara...

The Akunin Project is the first book to study the fiction and popular history of Grigorii Chkhartishvili, one of the most successful writers in post-Soviet Russia. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Chkhartishvili published over sixty...

Scholars have long noted the deeply rooted veneration of the power of the word-both the expressive and communicative capacities of language-in Russian literature and culture. In her ambitious book Silence and the Rest, Sofya Khagi illuminates a...

" . . . highly recommended. . . . This anthology of faithful translations of the classics is by far the best of its kind to come out for a long time." -Canadian Slavic ReviewProvides a broad selection of writing from Nikolai Karamzin and the beginnings...

If Dostoevsky claimed that all Russian writers of his day "came out from Gogol's 'Overcoat,'" then Edith W. Clowes boldly expands his dramatic image to describe the emergence of Russian philosophy out from under the "overcoat" of Russian literature. In...

A Stanford University Press classic.Book InformationISBN 9780804727037Author Alexander ZholkovskyFormat PaperbackPage Count 392Imprint Stanford University PressPublisher Stanford University PressWeight(grams) 522g

The description for this book, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, will be forthcoming.About the AuthorJoseph Frank (1918-2013) was professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford and Princeton. The five volumes of his...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780375761348Author Anton ChekhovFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Modern Library IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm) 202mm...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781899414208Author Viktor PelevinFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint Harbord PublishingPublisher Harbord Publishing Ltd

A long-awaited corrective to the controversial idea of world literature, from a major voice in the field.Katerina Clark charts interwar efforts by Soviet, European, and Asian leftist writers to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781451644715Author Andrew D KaufmanFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Simon & SchusterPublisher Simon & SchusterWeight(grams) 227gDimensions(mm) 211mm *...

In Dostoevsky as Suicidologist, Amy D. Ronner illustrates how self-homicide in Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction prefigures Emile Durkheim's etiology in Suicide as well as theories of other prominent suicidologists. This book not only fills a lacuna in...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780140187595Author Marina TsvetaevaFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint Penguin ClassicsPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 136gDimensions(mm) 196mm...

This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his...

Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) lived thought his country's savage wars and radical traumas, trying to welcome the new order. But there was no space in it for his kind of imagination. His poem "The Twelve" has claims to being the first great poem of the...