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Olga Sedakova stands out among contemporary Russian poets for the integrity, erudition, intellectual force, and moral courage of her writing. After years of flourishing quietly in the late Soviet underground, she has increasingly brought her considered voice into public debates to speak out for freedom of belief and for those who have been treated unjustly. This volume, the first collection of scholarly essays to treat her work in English, assesses her contributions as a poet and as a thinker, presenting far-reaching accounts of broad themes and patterns of thought across her writings as well as close readings of individual texts. Essayists from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, and the United States show how Sedakova has contributed to ongoing aesthetic and cultural debates. Like Sedakova's own work, the volume affirms the capacity of words to convey meaning and to change our understanding of life itself. The volume also includes dozens of elegant new translations of Sedakova's poems.
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Valentina Polukhina is professor emeritus at Keele University. She specializes in modern Russian poetry and is the author of several major studies of Joseph Brodsky and editor of bilingual collections of the poetry of Olga Sedakova, Dmitry Prigov, and Evegeny Rein. Daniel Weissbort is cofounder, along with Ted Hughes, and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and honorary professor at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Co-editor of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry (Iowa 1992), he is also the translator of more than a dozen books, editor of numerous anthologies, and author of many collections of his own poetry. His forthcoming books include a historical reader on translation theory, a book on Ted Hughes and translation, and an edited collection of selected translations of Hughes.
Olga Sedakova, one of Russia's great living poets, is also a deep and brilliant thinker. This collection of essays, her first in English, demonstrates that the legacy of such poet-essayists as Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky lives on in Russian culture. Andrew Wachtel, Bertha and Max Dressler Professon of the Humanities Northwestern University --
Readers often have regarded with curiosity the creative life of the poet. In this passionate and authoritative new study, David Bethea illustrates the relation between the art and life of nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin, the central figure in Russian thought and culture. Bethea shows how Pushkin, on the eve of his two-hundredth birthday, still speaks to our time. He indicates how we as modern readers might "realize"— that is, not only grasp cognitively, but feel, experience—the promethean metaphors central to the poet's intensely "sculpted" life. The Pushkin who emerges from Bethea's portrait is one who, long unknown to English-language readers, closely resembles the original b...
The last ten years were decisive for Russia, not only in the political sphere, but also culturally as this period saw the rise and crystallization of Russian postmodernism. The essays, manifestos, and articles gathered here investigate various manifestations of this crucial cultural trend. Exploring Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, they provide a point of departure and a valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies which is currently insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. A brief but useful "Who's Who in Russian Postmodernism" as an appendix introduces many authors who have never before appeared in a reference work of this kind and renders this book essential reading for those interested in the latest trends in Russian intellectual life.
At the heart of the Soviet experiment was a belief in the impermanence of the human spirit: souls could be engineered; conscience could be destroyed. The project was, in many ways, chillingly successful. But the ultimate failure of a totalitarian regime to fulfill its ambitions for social and spiritual mastery had roots deeper than the deficiencies of the Soviet leadership or the chaos of a "command" economy. Beneath the rhetoric of scientific communism was a culture of intellectual and cultural dissidence, which may be regarded as the "prehistory of perestroika." This volume explores the contribution of Christian thought and belief to this culture of dissent and survival, showing how religi...
A 1996 overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, from 1600 onwards.
Heribert Juliá and Humbert Herrera are opposites: the one can no longer paint, and doesn't much care, the other wants to create the sculpture to end all sculptures, the film of all films, the exhibit of all exhibitions. One couldn't care less about his mistress, the other swoops in. A fun-house mirror through which Monzó examines the creative process.
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.