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Mikhail Kuzmin
Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), Russia's first openly gay writer, stood at the epicenter of the turbulent cultural and social life of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad for over three decades. A poet of the caliber of Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and Marina Tsvetaeva (and acknowledged as such by them and other contemporaries), Kuzmin was also a prose writer, playwright, critic, translator, and composer who was associated with every aspect of modernism's history in Russia, from Symbolism to the Leningrad avant-gardes of the 1920s. Only now is Kuzmin beginning to emerge from the "official obscurity" imposed by the Soviet regime to assume his place as one of Russia's greatest poets and one of this century's most characteristic and colorful creative figures. This biography, the first in any language to be based on full and uncensored access to the writer's private papers, including his notorious Diary, places Kuzmin in the context of his society and times and contributes to our discovery and appreciation of a fascinating period and of Russia's long suppressed gay history.
Andrey Bely
No figure in turn-of-the-century Russia, John Malmstad asserts, better epitomizes the paradoxes of that era than Andrey Bely (1880–1934). Eulogized by Boris Pasternak as "the most remarkable writer of our age" and now widely regarded as the seminal figure in Russian modernism and as one of the major writers of this century, Bely subjected the received standards of truth and value in literature to a penetrating and radical critique. After a long period of suppression under the Stalinist regime, Bely has become the object of growing critical attention in both East and West. Originating in a symposium held in 1984 under the auspices of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University on the fiftieth anniversary of Bely's death, this volume includes ten essays by established scholars of modern Russian literature, including leading Western specialists on Bely. The essays survey Bely's major works in all genres, summarize present research on Bely, reassess critical approaches, and offer fresh interpretations. Analytic summaries of primary works make the essays fully accessible to non-Slavist readers.
Petersburg
Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg is considered one of the four greatest prose masterpieces of the 20th century. In this new edition of the best-selling translation, the reader will have access to the translators' detailed commentary, which provides the necessary historical and literary context for understanding the novel, as well as a foreword by Olga Matich, acclaimed scholar of Russian literature. Set in 1905 in St. Petersburg, a city in the throes of sociopolitical conflict, the novel follows university student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, who has gotten entangled with a revolutionary terrorist organization with plans to assassinate a government official–Nikolai's own father, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. With a sprawling cast of characters, set against a nightmarish city, it is all at once a historical, political, philosophical, and darkly comedic novel.
The Culture of Yellow
This is the first book to explore the cultural significance of the color yellow, showing how its psychological and aesthetic value marked and shaped many of the intellectual, political, and artistic currents of late modernity. It contends that yellow functions during this period primarily as a color of stigma and scandal. Yellow stigmatization has had a long history: it goes back to the Middle Ages when Jews and prostitutes were forced to wear yellow signs to emphasize their marginal status. Although scholars have commented on these associations in particular contexts, Sabine Doran offers the first overarching account of how yellow connects disparate cultural phenomena, such as turn-of-the-century decadence (the "yellow nineties"), the rise of mass media ("yellow journalism"), mass immigration from Asia ("the yellow peril"), and mass stigmatization (the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany). The Culture of Yellow combines cultural history with innovative readings of literary texts and visual artworks, providing a multilayered account of the unique role played by the color yellow in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European culture.
St. Petersburg
A landmark in Russian literature hailed as “one of the four great masterpieces of twentieth-century prose” by Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita. In this incomparable novel of the seething revolutionary Russia of 1905, Andrey Biely plays ingeniously on the great themes of Russian history and literature as he tells the mesmerizing tale of Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a high-ranking Tsarist official, and his dilettante son, Nikolai, an aspiring terrorist, whose first assignment is to assassinate his father. “There is nothing like a ticking time bomb to supply fictional suspense, and perhaps no other writer has ever used the device more successfully than Andrey Biely in St. Petersburg . . . Biely is a crafty storyteller who can keep a reader flipping the pages while whipping up an intellectual storm.” —Time
Russia's Rome
A wide-ranging study of empire, religious prophecy, and nationalism in literature, Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940 provides the first examination of Russia’s self-identification with Rome during a period that encompassed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state. Analyzing Rome-related texts by six writers—Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Aleksandr Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Mikhail Bulgakov—Judith E. Kalb argues that the myth of Russia as the “Third Rome” was resurrected to create a Rome-based discourse of Russian national identity that endured even as the empire of the tsars declined and fell and a ...
The Legacy of Ancient Rome in the Russian Silver Age
'This thoughtful and well-researched manuscript is an important contribution to several fields: 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature and philosophy, Classics and literary history. Many 20th-century Russian writers employ comparisons between 20th-century Russia and the Roman Empire, but this study is the first in-depth look at the basis for this all pervasive theme. Since the end of the Soviet Union the Symbolist period has become one of primary interest for Russians as they attempt to investigate elements of their pre-Soviet identity. The writers whose works are included here represent some of the most sophisticated and erudite in the whole of Russian literature, but many of them were, until recently [?] little studied or looked at through a distorting political prism.'Carol Ueland, Professor of Russian Literature, Drew University
By Authors Possessed
By Authors Possessed examines the development of the demonic in key Russian novels from the last two centuries. Defining the demonic novel as one that takes as its theme an evil presence incarnated in the protagonists and attributed to the Judeo-Christian Devil, Adam Weiner investigates the way the content of such a book can compromise the moral integrity of its narration and its sense of authorship. Weiner contends that the theme of demonism increasingly infects the narrative point of view from Gogol's Dead Souls to Dostoevsky's The Devils and Bely's Petersburg, until Nabokov exorcised the demonic novel through his fiction and his criticism. Starting from the premise that artistic creation has always been enshrouded in a haze of moral dilemma and religious doubt, Weiner's study of the demonic novel is an attempt to illuminate the potential ethical perils and aesthetic gains of great art.
Cultures of Forgery
In Cultures of Forgery, leading literary studies and cultural studies scholars examine the double meaning of the word "forge"-to create or to form, on the one hand, and to make falsely, on the other.
A History of Russian Literature
Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. A History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. The volume proceeds chronologically in five parts, extending from Kievan Rus' in the 11th century to the present day.The coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic focus. Parts are organized thematically in chapters, which a number of keywords that are important literary concepts that can serve as connecting motifs a...
