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Russian thinker, pedagogue, musicologist, amateur scientist, and public servant Odoevsky (1804-69) was mentioned in the same breath as Pushkin and Gogol during his day, and is now enjoying (we presume) a revival as a writer of Romantic and Gothic fiction. Cornwell (Russian and comparative literature, U. of Bristol, England) analyzes his contribution to Russian prose fiction, particularly his approach to Romanticism, his Gothic novellas, his proto-science fiction, and his critical reception. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters is a fully translated English edition of a three-volume account published by Nikolai Gretsch (1787–1867) in St. Petersburg in 1839. In the original Russian, Gretsch describes his travels in post-Napoleonic England, France, and Germany in 1837 at the behest of the Russian Empire. His official task was to examine educational systems, but as he travelled, he also noticed the cultural norms in his surroundings, the history of each country, and the personal experiences of the people he met. On his return home, Gretsch assembled his entertaining and often humorous personal observations into the edition that forms the basis for the present translation. His astute ...
Karen Petrone shatters the notion that World War I was a forgotten war in the Soviet Union. Although never officially commemorated, the Great War was the subject of a lively discourse about religion, heroism, violence, and patriotism during the interwar period. Using memoirs, literature, films, military histories, and archival materials, Petrone reconstructs Soviet ideas regarding the motivations for fighting, the justification for killing, the nature of the enemy, and the qualities of a hero. She reveals how some of these ideas undermined Soviet notions of military honor and patriotism while others reinforced them. As the political culture changed and war with Germany loomed during the Stalinist 1930s, internationalist voices were silenced and a nationalist view of Russian military heroism and patriotism prevailed.
Both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyday life and the domestic sphere served as an ideological battleground, simultaneously threatening Stalinist control and challenging traditional Russian gender norms that had been shaken by the Second World War. The Prose of Life examines how six female authors employed images of daily life to depict women’s experience in Russian culture from the 1960s to the present. Byt, a term connoting both the everyday and its many petty problems, is an enduring yet neglected theme in Russian literature: its very ordinariness causes many critics to ignore it. Benjamin Sutcliffe’s study is the first sustained examination of how and why ever...
This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy’s broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular culture. Her work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialist impulses and rhetoric in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement. In addition to some of Nepomnyashchy’s best previously published scholarly work, this volume includes excerpts from The Politics of Tradition: Rerooting Russian Literature After Stalin, the book manuscript that Nepomnyashchy was working on in the last years of her life.
Russian Nights, Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky's major work, is of great importance in Russian intellectual history. This captivating novel is the summation of Odoevsky's views and interests in many fields: Gothic literature, romanticism, mysticism, the occult, social responsibility, Westernization, utopia and anti-utopia. Compared variously to The Decameron, to Hoffman's Serapion Brethren, and the Platonic dialogues, Russian Nights is a mixture of genres - a series of romantic and society tales framed by Odoevsky's musings on the main strands of Russian thought of the 1820s and 1830s. This is a unique work of Russian literature, and a key sourcebook for Russian romanticism and Russian social and aesthetic thought of its epoch.
First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.
Satire and the fantastic, vital literary genres in the 1920s, are often thought to have fallen victim to the official adoption of socialist realism. Eric Laursen contends that these subversive genres did not just vanish or move underground. Instead, key strategies of each survive to sustain the villain of socialist realism. Laursen argues that the judgment of satire and the hesitation associated with the fantastic produce a narrative obsession with controlling the villain’s influence. In identifying a crucial connection between the questioning, subversive literature of the 1920s and the socialist realists, Laursen produces an insightful revision of Soviet literary history.
Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters is a fully translated English edition of a three-volume account published by Nikolai Gretsch (1787–1867) in St. Petersburg in 1839. In the original Russian, Gretsch describes his travels in post-Napoleonic England, France, and Germany in 1837 at the behest of the Russian Empire. His official task was to examine educational systems, but as he travelled, he also noticed the cultural norms in his surroundings, the history of each country, and the personal experiences of the people he met. On his return home, Gretsch assembled his entertaining and often humorous personal observations into the edition that forms the basis for the present translation. His astute ...