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This text represents an extraordinary example of late Russian literary development. It is populated with characters who are petty, grasping, perfidious and cruel, quite unlike the positive heroes of contemporary socialist and realist novels.
"For Dobychin, early Soviet society was an absurdist wonderland. He was not anti-Soviet but trans-Soviet, practicing realism but looking at reality from jarring angles that expose the neophyte Soviet culture. A typical Dobychin hero participates in character-building sports, witnesses a funeral procession, watches a parade, attends the unveiling of a monument to a fallen Communist - and finally reflects at the end of the day that he almost met a pretty young nurse."--Jacket.
"For Dobychin, early Soviet society was an absurdist wonderland. He was not anti-Soviet but trans-Soviet, practicing realism but looking at reality from jarring angles that expose the neophyte Soviet culture. A typical Dobychin hero participates in character-building sports, witnesses a funeral procession, watches a parade, attends the unveiling of a monument to a fallen Communist - and finally reflects at the end of the day that he almost met a pretty young nurse."--Jacket.
This text represents an extraordinary example of late Russian literary development. It is populated with characters who are petty, grasping, perfidious and cruel, quite unlike the positive heroes of contemporary socialist and realist novels.
"The Old Man veers between a contemporary effort to buy a dacha and the memories of an incident during the Civil War. A questionable action in the past haunts the present and throws into relief the materialism that has come to replace revolutionary idealism; by suggesting that this idealism may have been tainted in the first place, Trifonov implicitly blames the past for the ills of the present. While the setting and situation are very Soviet, the quandary Trifonov describes has universal significance." --Book Jacket.
A revolutionary terrorist, pondering the Gospels in his jail cell, is converted to a Tolstoyan understanding of true life, while an old schismatic's faith in himself is destroyed by an encounter in prison. In "Berries," Tolstoy condemns the frivolity of the 1905 revolution by contrasting the ridiculous conversations of liberals with the innocent labor of peasant children."--BOOK JACKET.
In Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both émigré literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources - from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and émigré literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova.
Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien. The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) – as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.
This anthology, the first of its kind, aims to be comprehensive. Valentina Polukhina surveys the entire scene, reading some 1000 collections and manuscripts, and thoroughly investigating what is accessible on the vibrant Russian literary Internet. The anthology ranges from Moscow to Vladivostok. It includes writers from former Soviet Republics such as the Ukraine. Work by Russian women poets living abroad (in Britain, the United States, Italy, France, Israel, etc) is also represented. Focusing on the middle generation, with major figures like Svetlana Kekova, Vera Pavolova and Tatyana Shcherbina, the anthology includes work by the youngest generation, born after 1970 and virtually unknown ou...
Editor: winter 1939-autumn 1941 J. C. Ransom.