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A Century of Ambivalence
A century ago the Russian Empire contained the largest Jewish community in the world, numbering about five million people. Today, the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union has dwindled to half a million, but remains probably the world's third largest Jewish community. In the intervening century the Jews of that area have been at the center of some of the most dramatic events of modern history -- two world wars, revolutions, pogroms, political liberation, repression, and the collapse of the USSR. They have gone through tumultuous upward and downward economic and social mobility and experienced great enthusiasms and profound disappointments. In startling photographs from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and with a lively and lucid narrative, A Century of Ambivalence traces the historical experience of Jews in Russia from a period of creativity and repression in the second half of the 19th century through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era. This redesigned edition, which includes more than 200 photographs and two substantial new chapters on the fate of Jews and Judaism in the former Soviet Union, is ideal for general readers and classroom use.
Silence and the Rest
Silence and the Rest argues that throughout its entire history, Russian poetry can be read as an argument for "verbal skepticism," positing a long-running dialogue between poets, philosophers, and theorists central to the antiverbal strain of Russian culture.
Towards a Typology of Poetic Forms
Metrics is often defined as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of meters. In this volume the term is used in a broader sense that more or less coincides with the traditional notion of versification . Understood this way, metrics is an eminently complex object that displays variation over time and in space, that concerns forms of a great variety and with different statuses (meters, rhymes, stanzas, prescribed forms, syllabification rules, nursery rhymes, slogans, musical textsetting, ablaut reduplication etc.), and that as a cultural manifestation is performed in a variety of ways (sung, chanted, spoken, read) that can have direct consequences on how it is structured. This profusion of forms is thought to correspond, at the level of perception, to a limited number of cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and to represent regularly iterating forms. This volume proposes a relatively coherent overall vision by distinguishing four main families of metrical forms, each clearly independent of the others and amenable to separate typologies."
State of Madness
What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the ...
Dovlatov and Surroundings
Dovlatov and Surroundings is a literary ode by one of the most consequential late 20th-century Russian writers, Alexander Genis, to another: Sergei Dovlatov. Though the book’s focus is ostensibly the man himself, the text unfolds as a comprehensive look at the Soviet, post-Soviet, and American cultures that shaped him and which he shaped. Dovlatov and Surroundings constantly, but effortlessly shifts its focus from the intimate to the sweeping, as Genis’s reflections on his friendship with Dovlatov organically give way to recollections about diaspora life, which transition smoothly into analyses of language, culture, politics, and literature. Characterized by Genis as an obituary, this book makes plain the significance of Dovlatov to Russian literature and the nuances of the Soviet cultural heritage.
Conversations in Exile
In 'Conversation In Exile, ' John Glad brings together interviews with fourteen prominent Russian writers in exile, all of whom currently live in the United States, France, or Germany. Conducted between 1978 and 1989, these frank and captivating interviews provide a rich and complex portrait of a national literature in exile.
Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1974-1980
The Religious-Philosophical Seminar, meeting in Leningrad between 1974-1980, was an underground study group where young intellectuals staged debates, read poetry and circulated their own typewritten journal, called ‘37’. The group and its journal offered a platform to poets who subsequently entered the canon of Russian verse, such as Viktor Krivulin (1944-2001) and Elena Shvarts (1948-2010). Josephine von Zitzewitz’s new study focuses on the Seminar’s identification of culture and spirituality, which allowed Leningrad’s unofficial culture to tap into the spirit of Russian modernism, as can be seen in ‘37’. This book is thus a study of a major current in twentieth-century Russian poetry, and an enquiry into the intersection between literary and spiritual concerns. But it also presents case studies of five poets from a special generation: not only Krivulin and Shvarts, but also Sergei Stratanovskii (1944-), Oleg Okhapkin (1944-2008) and Aleksandr Mironov (1948-2010).
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture
This addition to the highly successful Contemporary Cultures series covers the period from period 1953, with the death of Stalin, to the present day. Both ‘Russian’ and ‘Culture’ are defined broadly. ‘Russian’ refers to the Soviet Union until 1991 and the Russian Federation after 1991. Given the diversity of the Federation in its ethnic composition and regional characteristics, questions of national, regional, and ethnic identity are given special attention. There is also coverage of Russian-speaking immigrant communities. ‘Culture’ embraces all aspects of culture and lifestyle, high and popular, artistic and material: art, fashion, literature, music, cooking, transport, poli...
Joseph Brodsky and Modern Russian Culture
This volume is a major contribution to the study of the life, work and standing of Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Nobel Prize Laureate and the best-known Russian poet of the second half of the twentieth century. This is the most significant book devoted to him in the last 25 years, and features work by many of the leading experts on him, both in Russia and the West. Every one of the chapters makes a real contribution to different aspects of Brodsky – the growth of interest in his work, his world view and political position, and the unique aspects of his poetics. Taken together, the sixteen chapters offer a rounded interpretation of his significance for Russian culture today.
The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature
This book offers a comprehensive guide to global literary engagement with the Cold War. Eschewing the common focus on national cultures, the collection defines Cold War literature as an international current focused on the military and ideological conflicts of the age and characterised by styles and approaches that transcended national borders. Drawing on specialists from across the world, the volume analyses the period’s fiction, poetry, drama and autobiographical writings in three sections: dominant concerns (socialism, decolonisation, nuclearism, propaganda, censorship, espionage), common genres (postmodernism, socialism realism, dystopianism, migrant poetry, science fiction, testimonial writing) and regional cultures (Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe and the Americas). In doing so, the volume forms a landmark contribution to Cold War literary studies which will appeal to all those working on literature of the 1945-1989 period, including specialists in comparative literature, postcolonial literature, contemporary literature and regional literature.
