You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book first delves into the author's ancestry, thereby providing a partial slice of Russian Jewish history. It then offers an individual perspective on what it meant to grow up in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of WWII. It also gives a personal account of the rise and development of Jewish national awareness. It next describes a struggle for the immigration to Israel in the late 1960s and the early 1970s through job loss, persecution, arrests, imprisonment, and trial. It further relates the author's life in Israel, including his work at the Voice of Israel, study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and service in the Israel Defense Forces. Finally, it explores the author's academic career in the United States, from the graduate school at the University of Illinois to professorship at Cornell University.
A careful and intimate study on the ways Nabokov’s world perception and fictional universe were influenced by his father
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.
None
Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage considers Gogol's entire oeuvre, including his letters, notebooks, and drawings, as well as all relevant secondary literature, and exhaustively examines sources of Baroque influence on him, tracing them back to the oeuvre itself. This study draws on the most recent achievements of interdisciplinary scholarship, paying special attention to the interaction of the visual and the verbal and of high and popular cultural strata, so characteristic of the Baroque and at the same time so important to the understanding of Gogol's poetics. --From publisher's description.
The eleven contributors to this volume investigate the connections between Nabokov's output and the fields of painting, music, and ballet.
This book explores Vladimir Nabokov's literary thoughts, which blend Russian traditions, American values, European heritage, and multiculturalism, manifesting the cosmopolitan character of his writings and aesthetic ideas. Nabokov’s literary thoughts and writings inherit the legacies of various cultural traditions. This book explores four major facets of Nabokov’s intellectual and artistic origins: “Russianness,” “Americanness,” “Europeanness,” and multiculturalism. It discusses his affinity with major trends in twentieth-century literary theory, including Russian formalism, Bakhtinian poetics, New Criticism, aestheticism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, and cultur...
Nabokov’s distinguished and unique position in American literature has always been indisputable, but paradoxical. There has always been an element of foreignness in his writing. Nabokov’s Palace, however, aims to discover those sub-texts and inter-textual patterns embedded in Nabokov’s American novels which undeniably contribute towards making these works an integral part of the Anglo-American literary tradition. Aware of this tradition, in some of his late novels Nabokov also provides a literary historical overview of particular themes, such as friendship, melancholy, madness and trance, as they surfaced in literary texts throughout the history of English and American literature. To N...
Walter Cohen argues that the history of European literature and each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and by the ties of European literature to world literature. World literature is marked by recurrent, systematic features, outcomes of the way that language and literature are at once the products of major change and its agents. Cohen tracks these features from ancient times to the present, distinguishing five main overlapping stages. Within that framework, he shows that European literature's ongoing internal and external relationships are most visible at the level of form rather than of thematic statemen...
When one great author engages another, as Andrei Bely so brilliantly does in Gogol’s Artistry, the result is inevitably a telling portrait of both writers. So it is in Gogol’s Artistry. Translated into English for the first time, this idiosyncratic, exhaustive critical study is as interesting for what it tells us about Bely’s thought and method as it is for its insights into the oeuvre of his literary predecessor. Bely’s argument in this book is that Gogol’s earlier writing should be given more consideration than most critics have granted. Employing what might be called a scientific perspective, Bely considers how often certain colors appear; he diagrams sentences and discusses Gogol’s prose in terms of mathematical equations. The result, as strange and engaging as Bely’s best fiction, is also an innovative, thorough, and remarkably revealing work of criticism.