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Kathryn B. Feuer offers remarkable insights into Leo Tolstoy's creative process while he wrote War and Peace. She follows the novel through countless drafts and notes, illuminating its connection to earlier, unpublished, novels and to crucial new sources, both European and Russian. A novelist herself, Feuer explores the problems of character development, narrative voice, genre, and structure that Tolstoy ultimately resolved so brilliantly.
Most critics overlook the literary significance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's work, focusing instead on biographical, political, and moral interpretations. This examination of Solzhenitsyn's major novels--One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and August 1914--emphasizes that his writings must be understood within the tradition of Russian literature and the context of Western culture. James M. Curtis provides a detailed analysis of Tolstoy's crucial influence on Solzhenitsyn, and he discusses at length Solzhenitsyn's relationship to Dostoyevsky, Leskov, Chekhov, and Zamyatin. Curtis also demonstrates that a study of Ernest Hemingway (whose books have been enorm...
Virginia Woolf's rich and imaginative use of language was partly a result of her keen interest in foreign literatures and languages - mainly Greek and French, but also Russian, German and Italian. As a translator she naturally addressed herself both to contemporary standards of translation within the university, but also to readers like herself. In Three Guineas she ranged herself among German scholars who used Antigone to critique European politics of the 1930s. Orlando outwits the censors with a strategy that focuses on Proust's untranslatable word. The Waves and The Years show her looking ahead to the problems of postcolonial society, where translation crosses borders. In this in-depth study of Woolf and European languages and literatures, Emily Dalgarno opens up a rewarding new way of reading her prose.
Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, one of the world’s greatest film epics, originated as a consequence of the Cold War. Conceived as a response to King Vidor’s War and Peace, Bondarchuk’s surpassed that film in every way, giving the USSR one small victory in the cultural Cold War for hearts and minds. This book, taking up Bondarchuk’s masterpiece as a Cold War film, an epic, a literary adaptation, a historical drama, and a rival to Vidor’s Hollywood version, recovers—and expands—a lost chapter in the cultural and political history of the twentieth century. Like many great works of literature, Tolstoy’s epic tale proved a major challenge to filmmakers. After several early ef...
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.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.
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In December 1825, a group of liberal aristocrats, officers, and intelligentsia mounted a coup against the tsarist government of Russia. Inspired partially by the democratic revolutions in the United States and France, the Decembrist movement was unsuccessful; however, it led Russia's civil society to new avenues of aspiration and had a lasting impact on Russian culture and politics. Many writers and thinkers belonged to the conspiracy while others, including the poet Alexander Pushkin, were loosely or ambiguously affiliated. While the Decembrist movement and Pushkin's involvement has been well covered by historians, Emily Wang takes a novel approach, examining the emotional and literary moti...
For Humanity's Sake is the first study in English to trace the genealogy of the classic Russian novel, from Pushkin to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky. Lina Steiner demonstrates how these writers' shared concern for individual and national education played a major role in forging a Russian cultural identity. For Humanity's Sake highlights the role of the critic Apollon Grigor'ev, who was first to formulate the difference between Western European and Russian conceptions of national education or Bildung – which he attributed to Russia's special sociopolitical conditions, geographic breadth, and cultural heterogeneity. Steiner also shows how Grigor'ev's cultural vision served as the catalyst for the creative explosion that produced Russia's most famous novels of the 1860s and 1870s. Positing the classic Russian novel as an inheritor of the Enlightenment's key values – including humanity, self-perfection, and cross-cultural communication – For Humanity's Sake offers a unique view of Russian intellectual history and literature.
This monograph examines the contributions of landscape design to authority and to organization of public life in imperial Russia. Analyzing how tsars and nobles inscribed their political aspirations in the gardens they designed or inhabited, this study maps out a distinct trajectory in the meaning of landscape design. Based partly on archival documents, it explores the reasons for Catherine the Great's keen interest in landscape design. It reconstructs Grigorii Potemkin's attempts to transform the Crimea physically and symbolically into the garden of the empire. And it reveals the centrality of the garden for noblemen such as Andrei Bolotov and Alexander Kurakin, who expressed their politica...