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Despite the continued fascination with the Virgin Mary in modern and contemporary times, very little of the resulting scholarship on this topic extends to Russia. Russia's Mary, however, who is virtually unknown in the West, has long played a formative role in Russian society and culture. Framing Mary introduces readers to the cultural life of Mary from the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet era. It examines a broad spectrum of engagements among a variety of people—pilgrims and poets, clergy and laity, politicians and political activists—and the woman they knew as the Bogoroditsa. In this collection of well-integrated and illuminating essays, leading scholars of imperial, Soviet, and...
Founded by Maksim Gorky and Kornei Chukovsky in 1919 and disbanded in 1922, the Petrograd House of Arts occupied a crucial moment in Russia's cultural history. By chronicling the rise and fall of this literary landmark, this book conveys in greater depth and detail than ever before a significant but little studied period in Soviet literature. Poised between Russian culture's past and her Soviet future, between pre- and post-Revolutionary generations, this once lavish private home on the Nevsky Prospekt housed as many as fifty-six poets, novelists, critics, and artists at one time, during a period of great social and political turbulence. And as such, Hickey contends, the House of Arts served...
This is the first volume to consistently examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives: intellectual history, literary history and theory, comparative literature, translation studies, diaspora studies. Its emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet attention to world literature; as such, the present volume makes a significant contribution to current debates on world literature beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies and foregrounds the need to think of world literature pluralistically, in a manner that is not restricted by the agendas of Anglophone academe.
A century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.
This is the first work by Victor Beilis to make it into English since the single-volume publication in 2002 of a duo of novellas—“The Rehabilitation of Freud & Bakhtin and Others”(translated by Richard Grose). Much like the novellas that preceded it, “Death of a Prototype” is a hyper-allusive and self-consciously difficult work. Beilis engages closely with an entire spectrum of Russian and European cultural traditions, from classical antiquity to twentieth-century postmodernism. Structurally heterogeneous and fragmented with styles, genres and narrators succeeding one another at great speed, “Death of a Prototype” is also highly balanced and controlled, in some ways recalling a contrapuntal musical composition abounding in thematic echoes and correspondences. “Death of a Prototype” simultaneously challenges and rewards the reader, especially one attuned to fine-grain detail.
This book examines the history of translation under European communism, bringing together studies on the Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Poland. In any totalitarian regime maintaining control over cultural exchange is strategically important, so studying these regimes from the perspective of translation can provide a unique insight into their history and into the nature of their power. This book is intended as a sister volume to Translation Under Fascism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and adopts a similar approach of using translation as a lens through which to examine history. With a strong interdisciplinary focus, it will appeal to students and scholars of translation studies, translation history, censorship, translation and ideology, and public policy, as well as cultural and literary historians of Eastern Europe, Soviet communism, and the Cold War period.
Like many genres, biography came belatedly to Russia. As with other such late arrivals, biography underwent intensive growth in quantity, sophistication, cultural significance and popularity from the era of Nicholas I onwards. It stands today as a dominant force in post-Soviet publishing. Yet studies of Russian biography’s poetics and its role as a literary and cultural institution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain thin on the ground, a fact often lamented, yet not fully addressed, in the scattered writings on the subject. The present volume examines modern Russian biography as a literary form, a publishing phenomenon and a cultural force that reveals and contests hegemonic ideas of the role of the individual in society, and of the make-up of the human personality itself.
Making Modernism Soviet provides a new understanding of the ideological engagement of Russian modern artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vera Ermolaeva with the political and social agenda of the Bolsheviks in the chaotic years immediately following the Russian Revolution. Focusing on the relationship between power brokers and cultural institutions under conditions of state patronage, Pamela Kachurin lays to rest the myth of the imposition of control from above upon a victimized artistic community. Drawing on extensive archival research, she shows that Russian modernists used their positions within the expanding Soviet arts bureaucracy to build up networks of like-minded colleagues. Their commitment to one another and to the task of creating a socially transformative visual language for the new Soviet context allowed them to produce some of their most famous works of art. But it also contributed to the "Sovietization" of the art world that eventually sealed their fate.
Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?
This volume examines the staggering popularity of early-20th-century Russian detective serials, traditionally maligned as 'Pinkertonovshchina,' and posits the 'red Pinkerton' as a vital 'missing link' between pre- and post-Revolutionary popular literature.