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This absorbing collective biography of the genius Nobel family reveals how the Nobels' business and personal lives were fundamentally intertwined with the histories of Sweden and Russia, as well as the economic and entrepreneurial development of Europe in the long 19th century. The name Nobel is mainly associated with the Nobel prize. However, Alfred Nobel was only one of a family of conspicuously gifted individuals. The Nobels, who moved from Sweden to Russia in the 1830s, ran one of Russia's biggest machine factories and founded the Russian oil industry.Using thousands of Nobel family letters and other documents shared here for the first time, Bengt Jangfeldt provides a fascinating and aut...
A Life at Stake is the first serious biography of the legendary Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Physically imposing, crude, a sexual adventurer and ex-convict, Mayakovsky rose to fame between 1912 and 1917 as a Futurist agitator and the author of radical poems and plays. He embraced the Russian Revolution and became one of its most passionate propagandists, then at the age of thirty-six took his own life, disappointed in the course of Soviet society and ravaged by private conflicts. Mayakovsky s poems are as exhilarating today as when he declaimed them for friends in smoky flats in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and New York. In Bengt Jangfeldt s propulsive biography, Mayakovsky s life, too, is compelling: a story of constant, passionate upheaval against the background of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Stalin s terror, and cycles of anti-Semitism. Mayakovsky emerges from this biography a highly vulnerable figure, more a dreamer than a revolutionary, more a political romantic than a hardened Communist."
In the early twentieth century, a group of writers banded together in Moscow to create purely original modes of expression. These avant-garde artists, known as the Futurists, distinguished themselves by mastering the art of the scandal and making shocking denunciations of beloved icons. With publications such as "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," they suggested that Aleksandr Pushkin, the founder of Russian literature, be tossed off the side of their "steamship of modernity." Through systematic and detailed readings of Futurist texts, James Rann offers the first book-length study of the tensions between the outspoken literary group and the great national poet. He observes how those in the movement engaged with and invented a new Pushkin, who by turns became a founding father to rebel against, a source of inspiration to draw from, a prophet foreseeing the future, and a monument to revive. Rann's analysis contributes to the understanding of both the Futurists and Pushkin's complex legacy. The Unlikely Futurist will appeal broadly to scholars of Slavic studies, especially those interested in literature and modernism.
The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mir...
Now that the political rhetoric can end, Erlich (Russian literature, Yale U.) examines the impact of the 1917 revolution on Russian poetry, criticism, and artistic prose. He looks at the flirtations with modernism of the early 20th century and compares the futurists, formalists, novelists, and short-story writers of the first decade of the new social and political order. Assumes no knowledge of Russian. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Translation is a very important tool in our multilingual world. Excellent translation is a sine qua non in the work of the Swedish Academy, responsible for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In order to establish a forum for discussing fundamental aspects of the translation of poetry and poetic prose, a Nobel Symposium on this subject was organized.The list of contributors includes Sture Allén, Jean Boase-Beier, Philippe Bouquet, Anders Cullhed, Gunnel Engwall, Eugene Eoyang, Efim Etkind, Inga-Stina Ewbank, Knut Faldbakken, Seamus Heaney, Lyn Hejinian, Bengt Jangfeldt, Francis R Jones, Elke Liebs, Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, Göran Malmqvist, Shimon Markish, Margaret Mitsutani, Judith Moffett, Mariya Novykova, Tim Parks, Ulla Roseen, Emmanuela Tandello, Eliot Weinberger, Daniel Weissbort, and Fran(oise Wuilmart.
""In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a cafe called Ziemianska."" Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the ""fin de siecle,"" They sat in Cafe Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. ""Caviar and Ashes"" tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically. Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafes to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.
This book deals mostly with American avant-garde literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the present-day practice and politics of its translation into Polish, trying to answer the following questions: What are the meaning and the limits of avantgardism? What is the rationale of literary translations and what is their life-cycle in receiving literary polysystems? Furthermore: What is the importance of translation in shaping the politics of meaning – our collective textual practices determining our epistemological perspectives in literature and beyond? And finally: What are the consequences of implementing foreign modes of thinking and making politics in the receiving culture, both in the social sphere and in writing?
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