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The book presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues: with the emerging Soviet Union and with the dizzying world of European modernism that surrounded them in the West. Chapters address generational differences, literary polemics and experimentation, the heritage of pre-October Russian modernism, and the fate of individual writers and critics, offering a sweeping view of how exiles created a literary diaspora. The discussion moves beyond Russian studies to contribute to today's broad, cross-cultural study of the creative side of political and cultural displacement.
As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian émigré community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet government that followed. However, Charlottengrad embodied a full range of personal and political positions vis-à-vis the Soviet project, from enthusiastic loyalty to questioning ambivalence and pessimistic alienation. By closely examining the intellectual output of Charlottengrad, Roman Utkin explores how community membe...
First published in 1997. Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature here - finally - available in English, is devoted to the origins of Greek tragedy. In it, Freidenberg develops the notion that it was the very transition from thinking based on mythological images to the kind of thinking that makes use of formal-logical concepts that resulted in the appearance of literature. With the transition from mythological thinking to conceptual thought, the content of mythological images became the texture of the new concepts. The inherited mythological forms now were reinterpreted conceptually: causalized, ethicized, generalized, abstracted. This reinterpretation, in turn, brought about poetic figurality. Folkloric material began to be differentiated from the mythological images of the past into various disciplines such as religion, philosophy, ethics, literature, and art. Yet, differentiated and reinterpreted as it was, the folkloric material remained formally preserved in poetic image, structure, and plot.
These essays rethink the nature of Stalinism and Nazism and establish a new methodology for viewing their histories that goes well beyond outdated twentieth-century models of totalitarianism, ideology, and personality. They offer a new understanding of the intertwined trajectories of socialism and nationalism in European and global history.
This book explores the unique way in which Russian culture constructs the notion of everyday life, or byt, and offers the first unified reading of Silver-age narrative which it repositions at the centre of Russian modernism. Drawing on semiotics and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two traditions, one reflected in western representational aesthetics for which daily existence figures as neutral and normative, the other encapsulated in the Orthodox emphasis on iconic embodiment. Hutchings identifies early 'Decadent' formulations of byt as a milestone after which writers from Chekhov to Rozanov sought to affirm the iconic potential hidden in Russian realism's critique of representationalism. Provocative, yet careful, textual analyses reveal a consistent urge to redefine art's function as one not of representing life, but of transfiguring the everyday.
This is a study of manifold identities focusing on music and musicology.
In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intelle...
Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism sheds light on the oeuvre of Alexei Remizov (1877-1957), a great modernist eccentric who has remained largely unknown to Western audiences. Although his original prose garnered him early acclaim and has since entered the Russian literary canon, Remizov's artistic capacity was fully realized only after his experimentation with words and images culminated in a writing process that relies as much on drawing as it does on language. --
This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” to investigate how the idea of "nation" embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting. In our divided, post–Cold War, and now post–9/11 world, Russian music, formerly a quiet corner on the margins of musicology, has become a site of noisy contention. Richard Taruskin assesses the political and cultural stakes that attach to it in the era of Pussy Riot and renewed international tensions, before turning to individual cases from the nineteenth century to the present. Much of the volume is devoted to the reso...