In the centenary year of Nabokov's birth, eleven of the world's foremost Nabokov scholars offer original essays on the writer and his fiction. They cover a broad range of topics and approaches, from c
This book examines the influence of Christianity on the thought and work of the great Russian theorist Mikhael Bakhtin, paying particular attention to the motifs of God the Creator, the Fall, the Inca
This first full-length account of the Russian verse tradition shows how certain formal features are associated with certain genres and specific themes. Keeping technical terms to a minimum and providi
This is the first book to provide a synthesising study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of empire-building. From Pushkin's ambivalent portrayal of an alpine Circassia to Tolstoy's condemnation of tsarist aggression against Muslim tribes in Hadji Murat, the literary analysis is firmly set in its historical context, and the responses of the Russian readership too receive extensive attention. As well as exploring literature as such, this study introduces material from travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the utterances of tsarist officials and military commanders. While showing how literature often underwrote imperialism, the book carefully explores the tensions between the Russian state's ideology of a European mission to civilise the Muslim mountaineers, and romantic perceptions of those tribes as noble primitives whose extermination was no cause for celebration. By dealing with imperialism in Georgia as well, the study shows
Published in 1999 to mark the centenary of Vladimir Nabokov's birth, this volume brings together the work of eleven of the world's foremost Nabokov scholars offering perspectives on the writer and his fiction. Their essays cover a broad range of topics and approaches, from close readings of major texts, including Speak, Memory and Pale Fire, to penetrating discussions of the significant relationship between Nabokov's personal beliefs and experiences and his art. Several of the essays attempt to uncover the artistic principles that underlie the author's literary creations, while others seek to place Nabokov's work in a variety of literary and cultural contexts. Among these essays are a first glimpse at a little-known work, The Tragedy of Mr Morn, as well as a perspective on Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita. The volume as a whole offers valuable insight into Nabokov scholarship.
The work of the great Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has been examined from a wide variety of literary and theoretical perspectives. None of the many studies of Bakhtin begins to do justice, however, to the Christian dimension of his work. Christianity in Bakhtin for the first time fills this important gap. Having established the strong presence of a Christian framework in his early philosophical essays, Ruth Coates explores the way in which Christian motifs, though suppressed, continue to find expression in the work of Bakhtin's period of exile, and re-emerge in texts written during the time of his rehabilitation. Particular attention is paid to the themes of Creation, Fall, Incarnation and Christian love operating within metaphors of silence and exile, concepts which inform Bakhtin's world view as profoundly as they influence his biography.
The turn of the nineteenth century, a time of exceptional creativity in Russia, was also a time of great receptivity to foreign cultural influences. Among the most important of these were English poetry and aesthetic thought, which gave new impetus to the Russian imagination. This 1998 book is a study of the Russian reception of English literature from Romanticism to aestheticism, focusing particularly on the reception by Russian poets of Shelley, Ruskin, Pater, Frazer and Wilde. Framing this account is a pioneering exploration of the intellectual background to these influences in comparative scholarship, illuminating a common interest in myth, folklore, anthropology, and the origins of language. This book discusses the relationship between Russian conceptions of national identity, literary influence and the origins of comparative literary history.
Karamzin was the foremost Russian representative of the late eighteenth-century Sentimentalist movement. In this study, Gitta Hammarberg makes use of advances in literary theory (especially those based on the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov) in order to develop a theory of Sentimentalist literature, which she applies to Karamzin's prose fiction. Professor Hammarberg situates Sentimentalism in its historical context, as a reflection of contemporary shifts in world view, a reaction against the neo classicist view of literature, and a vehicle for legitimizing prose fiction. She stresses the importance of the role of the author-reader in the structure of Sentimentalist texts, and relates this to the style and genres of these works. Through close readings of a representative selection of Karamzin's prose fiction, including works previously disregarded as trivial or frivolous, she shows the range of Sentimentalist fiction, its place in literary evolution, and ways in which it anticipates the
The Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) belongs to a Russian philosophical tradition that includes such figures as Vladimir Solov'ev, Mikhail Bakhtin and Boris Pasternak. This 1992 study investigates the interrelation of themes, imagery and the use of language in his prose. Thomas Seifrid shows how Platonov was particularly influenced by Russian utopian thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how his world view was also shaped by its implicit dialogue with the 'official' Soviet philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, and later with Stalinist utopianism. He discusses how in Platonov's masterpieces of the late 1920s and early 1930s linguistic parody comes together with existential angst and dystopian doubts about the course of Soviet history. The study concludes with consideration of the works Platonov wrote from 1934 to 1951, in the age of socialist realism. In these, he manoeuvred to preserve some of the essentials of his earlier world view and verbal manner
Reading Russian Fortunes examines the huge popularity and cultural impact of fortune-telling among urban and literate Russians from the eighteenth century to the present. Based partly on a study of the numerous editions of little fortune-telling books, especially those devoted to dream interpretation, it documents and analyses the social history of fortune-telling in terms of class and gender, at the same time considering the function of both amateur and professional fortune-telling in a literate modernizing society. Chapters are devoted to professional fortune-tellers and their clients, and to the publishers of the books. An analysis of the relationship between urban fortune-telling and traditional oral culture, where divination played a very significant role, leads on to a discussion of the underlying reasons for the persistence of fortune-telling in modern Russian society.
Khlebnikov is becoming recognized as one of the major Russian poets of the twentieth century, having for years been dismissed as a purveyor of unintelligible verbal trickery. This book provides a broad survey of his work. Dr Cooke's aim is to be both informative and interpretative by mapping out the contours of Khlebnikov's still largely uncharted poetic world. He highlights the complex relations between the poet and his public, draws attention to Khlebnikov's preoccupation with the meaning as well as the poetry of language, points to the significance of images of war and conflict in his work, and shows how the figure of the poet-warrior can metamorphose into the poet-prophet. There is also an examination of the vexed problem of Khlebnikov's attitudes towards his manuscripts and his concept of the book.
Wagner is often held to have exerted a greater impact on modern culture than any other artist, yet the history of the reception of his works in Russia has remained largely unexplored. This book, which draws extensively on unpublished archival materials and other contemporary sources, aims to show that in certain important respects, Wagner's music and ideas found more fertile ground in Russia than anywhere else in Europe. Beginning with the first mention of Wagner's name in the Russian press in 1841, and ending almost 150 years later when the composer was finally rehabilitated during the years of glasnost, this study provides a detailed account of Wagner's visit to Russia in 1863, and a history of the productions of his works in Russia. The book pays special attention to Wagner's important influence on the Russian modernist movement, focusing particularly on his impact on the leading Symbolist writers, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok.
This work is an innovative and controversial study of how four famous Jews writing in Russian in the early Soviet period attempted to resolve the conflict between their cultural identity and their place in Revolutionary Russia. Babel, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Ehrenburg struggled in very different ways to form creative selves out of the contradictions of origins, outlook, and social or ideological pressures. Efraim Sicher also explores the broader context of the literature and art of the Jewish avant-garde in the years immediately preceding and following the Russian Revolution. By comparing literary texts and the visual arts the author reveals unexpected correspondences in the response to political and cultural change. This study contributes to our knowledge of an important aspect of modern Russian writing and will be of interest to both Jewish scholars and those concerned with Slavonic studies.
Jacques Catteau's much-acclaimed book on Dostoyevsky, which has already received three literary prizes (and one medical) in France, appears here in English for the first time. It is an original and detailed attempt to re-examine Dostoyevsky the artist, tracing the creative process from its beginnings in the notebooks to its expression in the novels, and at the same time analysing the structures of time and space, the role of colour, and other important features of the texts. For this edition the author has taken the opportunity to revise his text and bring the bibliography up to date, where possible giving references to the Soviet Academy of Sciences' edition of Dostoyeysky's works and to English versions of critical sources.
This book explores the unique way in which Russian culture constructs the notion of everyday life, or byt, and offers the first unified reading of Silver-age narrative which it repositions at the centre of Russian modernism. Drawing on semiotics and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two traditions, one reflected in western representational aesthetics for which daily existence figures as neutral and normative, the other encapsulated in the Orthodox emphasis on iconic embodiment. Hutchings identifies early 'Decadent' formulations of byt as a milestone after which writers from Chekhov to Rozanov sought to affirm the iconic potential hidden in Russian realism's critique of representationalism. Provocative, yet careful, textual analyses reveal a consistent urge to redefine art's function as one not of representing life, but of transfiguring the everyday.
This is the first book on Andrei Bitov, one of contemporary Russia's most original writers. It plots his evolution from his early publications of the post-Stalin years to his mature masterpieces of the glasnost era. Ellen Chances assesses his place both in the Russian literary tradition from Pushkin onwards, and as part of a broader, international cultural heritage including Dickens, Fellini, and Proust. She explores his themes, from the psychological effects of Stalin on Soviet society to universal questions such as the human being's relationship with nature, history and culture, and discovers in his deeply philosophical and intensely psychological writings an innovative methodology, 'ecological prose', that goes beyond modernist and post-modernist fragmentation in search of the wholeness of life.
Iurii Trifonov (1925–81) has become well known in the West as a writer of Soviet urban life. This study, first published in 1993, concentrates on his exploration of major events in Russian history (such as the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the Russian Civil War) and their implications and consequences for his time. David Gillespie traces this interest through all of Trifonov's writings, from his earliest, Stalin prize-winning period to the self-consciously modernist later works, in which Trifonov emphasizes the interconnectedness of human life and history, with the individual as 'the nerve' of history; linking epochs, places, civilizations. Trifonov discerns patterns and analogies in history, and develops a language of hints and allusions with which to combat the repressive censorship of his time.
Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903–1958) was one of the great poets of twentieth-century Russia. As the last link in the Russian Futurist tradition and the first significant poet to come of age in the Soviet period, Zabolotsky wrote poetry both highly experimental and classical. This book, first published in 1994, was the first critical biography of Zabolotsky to appear in English. Goldstein examines not only Zabolotsky's poetic career but also his life, from his obscure origins in the Russian countryside to his arrest and imprisonment in the 1930s. At the same time, Goldstein highlights the deep ambiguity of Zabolotsky's era by exploring the ways in which the poet was influenced both by the artistic avant-garde and by the Soviet scientific establishment.
This wide-ranging 1996 study presents an examination of the extraordinary diversity and range of satirical writing in Russian literature and will be of interest not only to Slavicists but also to those interested in genre theory. Through the close analysis of seminal satirical texts written by five Russian and émigré authors in the 1970s and 1980s, Karen Ryan-Hayes demonstrates that formal and thematic parody is pervasive and that it provides additional levels of meaning in contemporary Russian satire. Each work under examination is placed within the wider European literary context as well as within the Russian tradition and is representative of a different sub-genre of satire. The author focuses on a variety of these genres and modes and offers practical criticism on each text. The writers under discussion have enjoyed a positive reception in the West and their works demonstrate the variety and vitality of Russian and Soviet satire.
This is a comprehensive study of a group of avant-garde Soviet writers active in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s who styled themselves OBERIU, 'The Association for Real Art'. Graham Roberts re-examines commonly held assumptions about OBERIU, its identity as a group, its aesthetics and its place within the Russian and European literary traditions. He focuses on the prose and drama of group members Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedensky, and Konstantin Vaginov; he also considers work by Nikolay Zabolotsky and Igor Bakhterev, as well as the group's most important 'fellow-traveller', Nikolay Oleinikov. He places OBERIU in the context of the aesthetic theories of the Russian formalists and the Bakhtin circle. Roberts concludes by showing how the self-conscious literature of OBERIU - its metafiction - occupies an important transitional space between modernism and postmodernism.
