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My Half Century
"Anna Akhmatova is known as one of twentieth-century Russia's greatest poets, a member of the quartet that included Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva. This is the first paperback collection of her prose available in English." "The subjects of her memoirs are extraordinary: she describes Modigliani as she knew him in Paris, Blok near the end of his days, and Mandelstam as a close friend. The autobiographical prose section reveals the elusive poet's personality more clearly than any biography could, including her thoughts about how difficult it was to be a poet at a time when women writers were rarely taken seriously." --Book Jacket.
Envy
“To read [this] triumphant short novel is . . . to behold man’s heroic confrontation with the monsters of his own creation.” —The New York Times Andrei Babichev is a paragon of Soviet values, an innovative and practical man, Director of the Food Industry Trust, a man whose vision encompasses such future advances for mankind as the 35-kopeck sausage and the self-peeling potato. Out of kindness, he rescues from the gutter Nikolai Karalerov, violently tossed from a bar after a drunken and self-destructive tirade. But instead of gratitude, Babichev finds himself the subject of an endlessly malignant jealousy, as Kavaelrov sees in him a representative of the new breed of man who has preve...
Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond
In many ways what is identified today as “cultural globalization” in Eastern Europe has its roots in the Cold War phenomena of samizdat (“do-it-yourself” underground publishing) and tamizdat (publishing abroad). This volume offers a new understanding of how information flowed between East and West during the Cold War, as well as the much broader circulation of cultural products instigated and sustained by these practices. By expanding the definitions of samizdat and tamizdat from explicitly political print publications to include other forms and genres, this volume investigates the wider cultural sphere of alternative and semi-official texts, broadcast media, reproductions of visual art and music, and, in the post-1989 period, new media. The underground circulation of uncensored texts in the Cold War era serves as a useful foundation for comparison when looking at current examples of censorship, independent media, and the use of new media in countries like China, Iran, and the former Yugoslavia.
Disappearance
First published posthumously in 1987 during the post-glasnost rise of literary freedom, Disappearance is a work of earlier times. Originally begun in the 1950s, this novel of childhood moves back and forth between 1937 and 1942, two troubled years in Soviet history, when the disappearances of family and friends during the Stalinist purges and the Second World War become regular occurrences in the difficult life of a young Russian man.
The Naked Year
“One of the earliest . . . attempts to create a paradigm of ‘the new prose’ about the [Russian] Revolution . . . self-consciously experimental, openly modernist.” —The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature The Naked Year, a flinchingly honest portrayal of life in post-Revolutionary Russia, catapulted author Boris Pilnyak into notoriety. The Naked Year follows the provincial town of Ordinin through 1919, a year of war, illness, and tumultuous change. The village and its inhabitants—merchants, nobles, peasants, and communists alike—experience firsthand the impact of the violent revolutionary struggle of the Reds, Whites, Blacks, and Greens, until their world eventually dissolves into chaos. So lyrical and surreal that it has been called the “anti-novel,” The Naked Year captures the emotional heart of a land trapped in the horrific gap year between frenzied Revolution and rigid Soviet control.
Written Here, Published There
Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe's irreversible division. It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Through this cultural practice, I offer a new reading of Cold War Europe's history. Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the 'Other Europe' to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature.
The Goatibex Constellation
From the Russian author of the banned book Sandro of Chegem, this satire of life in the twentieth century USSR takes on agricultural production and genetics. The Goatibex Constellation is the story of a young newspaperman who returns to his native Abkhazia and is soon caught up in the publicity campaign for a newly produced farm animal—a cross between a goat and a West Caucasian tur. What follows is a vicious and hilarious satire of the Soviet Union’s top-down approach to agriculture, genetics . . . and just about everything else. Harshly criticized at home upon its publication in 1966, The Goatibex Constellation is as fresh, imaginative, and damning today as it was then.
A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism
This edited volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with o...
Cultural Capitalism
Cultural Capitalism explores Russian literature's eager embrace of capitalism in the post-Soviet era. When the Soviet Union fell, books were suddenly bought and sold as commodities. Russia's first bestseller lists brought attention and prestige. Even literary prizes turned to the market for legitimacy. The rise of capitalism entirely transformed both the economics and the aesthetics of Russian literature. By reconstructing the market's influence on everything from late-Soviet paper shortages to the prose of neoimperialism, Cultural Capitalism reveals Russian literature's exuberant hopes for and deep disappointments in capitalism. Only a free market, it was hoped, could cure endemic book defi...
