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This volume offers readers an engaging collection of published and unpublished articles by Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy's work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialism in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement.
Andrei Sinyavsky wrote Strolls with Pushkin while confined to Dubrovlag, a Soviet labor camp, smuggling the pages out a few at a time to his wife. His irreverent portrait of Pushkin outraged émigrés and Soviet scholars alike, yet his "disrespect" was meant only to rescue Pushkin from the stifling cult of personality that had risen up around him. Anglophone readers who question the longstanding adoration for Pushkin felt by generations of Russians will enjoy tagging along on Sinyavsky's strolls with the great poet, discussing his life, fiction, and famously untranslatable poems. This new edition of Strolls with Pushkin also includes a later essay Sinyavsky wrote on the artist, "Journey to the River Black."
A wide-ranging consideration of the nature and significance of Pushkin's African heritage Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia's greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin's African ancestry has played the role of a "wild card" ...
A timely study of the "new Russia" at the end of the twentieth century.
Comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors' memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanization, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives -- arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, labor camps, exile, escapes, special punishment, the role of chance, and deprivation -- Toker discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of these accounts and the ethical and aesthetic imperative they fulfill. Her readings provide extraordinary insight into prisoners' experiences of the Soviet penal system. Special attention is devoted to the writings of Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but many works that are not well known in the West, especially those by women, are addressed. Consideration is also given to events that recently brought many memoirs to light years after they were written.
The acceptance of Christianity in the tenth century is the most significant cultural event in the history of modern Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia. Now Slavic specialists, theologians, historians, and literary scholars can turn to a collection that examines the majestic sweep of a thousand years of Slavic Christianity. This three-volume collection brings together essays from two international conferences. The present volume explores cultural history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Volume I (published in 1993) examines the history and influences of Christianization from the tenth to the seventeenth century, and Volume III will focus on the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Considered one of Russia’s greatest philosophers, Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) was also a theologian, historian, poet, and social and political critic. His works have emerged to enjoy renewed attention in post–Soviet Russia, and his concerns echo in contemporary discussions of politics, law, and morality. In this collection of Soloviev’s essays—many translated into English for the first time—the philosopher explores an array of social issues, from the death penalty to nationalism to women’s rights. Soloviev reacts against the tradition of European rationalist thought and seeks to synthesize religious philosophy, science, and ethics in the context of a universal Christianity. In these writings he reveals the centrality of human rights in his Christian worldview, not only as an abstract theory but also as an inspiration in everyday life. In a substantive introduction and copious annotations to the essays, Vladimir Wozniuk points out distinctive and often overlooked features of Soloviev’s works while illuminating his place within both the Russian and Western intellectual traditions.
Since his death in 1837, Alexander Pushkin—often called the “father of Russian literature”—has become a timeless embodiment of Russian national identity, adopted for diverse ideological purposes and reinvented anew as a cultural icon in each historical era (tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet). His elevation to mythic status, however, has led to the celebration of some of his writings and the shunning of others. Throughout the history of Pushkin studies, certain topics, texts, and interpretations have remained officially off-limits in Russia—taboos as prevalent in today’s Russia as ever before. The essays in this bold and authoritative volume use new approaches, overlooked archival materials, and fresh interpretations to investigate aspects of Pushkin’s biography and artistic legacy that have previously been suppressed or neglected. Taken together, the contributors strive to create a more fully realized Pushkin and demonstrate how potent a challenge the unofficial, taboo, alternative Pushkin has proven to be across the centuries for the Russian literary and political establishments.
Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing. Through close textual analysis combined with intellectual biography and literary theory, Nicole Svobodny puts the spotlight on Nijinsky as reader. She elucidates Nijinsky's riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, equating these intertextual connections to "marking" a dance, whereby the dancer uses a reduction strategy situated between thinking and doing. By exploring the intersections of bodily movement with verbal language, this book addresses broader questions of how we sense and make sense of our worlds. Drawing on archival research, along with studies...