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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...
Religion and Secular Modernity in Russian Christianity, Judaism, and Atheism is a multifaceted account of the engagement between religion and the secular in Russia's Christian, Jewish, and atheist traditions. Ana Siljak brings together an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to present unique perspectives on the secularization dynamic in Russia and the Soviet Union, telling stories about theologians, sects, churches, poets, and artists. From the Jewish Christian priest Alexander Men, to the cross-dressing poet Zinaida Gippius, to the Soviet promoter of Yiddish theater Solomon Mikhoels, Religion and Secular Modernity in Russian Christianity, Judaism, and Atheism gives a voice to a variety of actors who have grappled with the possibilities of faith and unbelief in an industrialized, modern, and seemingly secular world. Now more than ever, as one narrative of Russia's religious history dominates official Russian accounts, alternative perspectives of the relationship between Russian religion and secularism should be highlighted and emphasized.
In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective art...
Unorthodox Beauty shows how Russian poets of the early twentieth century consciously adapted Russian Orthodox culture in order to create a distinctly religious modernism. Martha M. F. Kelly contends that, beyond mere themes, these writers developed an entire poetics that drew on liturgical tradition. Specifically, Russian Orthodoxy held out the possibility of unifying spirit and matter, as well as a host of other dichotomies--subject and object, empirical and irrational, noumena and phenomena. The artist could produce a work of transformative and regenerative power. Using a range of crossdisciplinary tools, Kelly reads key works by Blok, Kuzmin, Akhmatova, and Pasternak in ways that illustrate how profoundly religious traditions and ideas shaped Russian modernist literature.
A comprehensive collection exploring the role of ideas, institutions, and movements in the evolution of Russian religious thought, Contains cutting-edge scholarship that expands understanding of one of the richest aspects of Russian cultural and intellectual life, Considers the influence of Russian religious thought in the West and the role of religion in aesthetics, music, poetry, art, film, and the novel, An authoritative reference for students and scholars Book jacket.
The first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry and its embrace of freedom—formally, thematically, and spiritually Since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian poetry has exuded a powerful awareness of freedom, both aesthetic and political. No longer confined to the cultural underground, poets reacted with immediacy to events in the world. In The Freest Speech in Russia, Stephanie Sandler offers the first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry, showing how these poems both express and exemplify freedom. This period was a time of great poetic flourishing for Russian poets, whether they remained in Russia or lived elsewhere. Sandler examines the work of ...
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