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The third volume in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe focuses on the making and remaking of those institutional structures that engender and regulate the creation, distribution, and reception of literature. The focus here is not so much on shared institutions but rather on such region-wide analogous institutional processes as the national awakening, the modernist opening, and the communist regimentation, the canonization of texts, and censorship of literature. These processes, which took place in all of the region’s cultures, were often asynchronous and subjected to different local conditions. The volume’s premise is that the national awakening and institutional...
Though the Russian Symbolist movement was dominated by a concern with transcending sex, many of the writers associated with the movement exhibited an intense preoccupation with matters of the flesh. Drawing on poetry, plays, short stories, essays, memoirs, and letters, as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Beyond the Flesh documents the often unexpected form that this obsession with gender and the body took in the life and art of two of the most important Russian Symbolists. Jenifer Presto argues that the difficulties encountered in reading Alexander Blok and Zinaida Gippius within either a feminist or a traditional, binary gendered framework derive not only from the peculiarities of their creative personalities but also from the specific Russian cultural context. Although these two poets engaged in gendered practices that, at times, appeared to be highly idiosyncratic and even incited gossip among their contemporaries, they were not operating in a vacuum. Instead, they were responding to philosophical concepts that were central to Russian Symbolism and that would continue to shape modernism in Russia.
First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.
Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden presents new comparative perspectives on transnational literary studies. This collection provides a contribution to the production of new narratives of the nation. The focus of the contributions is contemporary fiction relating to experiences of migration. The volume discusses multicultural writing, emerging modes of writing and generic innovations. When people are in motion, it changes nations, cultures and peoples. The volume explores the ways in which transcultural connections have affected the national self-understanding in the Swedish and Finnish context. It also presents comparative aspects on the reception of literary works and explores th...
This volume surveys the Russian effort throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries to unite Russian and Finnish literature. The book discusses various contacts, meetings, disagreements, and conflicts between the Russians and the Finns in their interrelationship in the area of Russian literature and the Russian language. Diverse historical sources and literary documents are cited. It is a study that reveals the Russian literary endeavor in Finland from 1808 to 1956, which glorified the idea of beauty, grace, and refinement, qualities of the artistic temperament stifled by the Bolsheviks.
Twelve groundbreaking essays show the varied and complex ways in which ideas about sexuality, gender, and the body have shaped and been influenced by Russian literature, history, art, and philosophy from the medieval period to the present day.
Flannery O'Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky shared a deep faith in Christ, which compelled them to tell stories that force readers to choose between eternal life and demonic possession. Their either-or extremism has not become more popular in the last fifty to a hundred years since these stories were first published, but it has become more relevant to a twenty-first-century culture in which the lukewarm middle ground seems the most comfortable place to dwell. Giving the Devil His Due walks through all of O'Connor's stories and looks closely at Dostoevsky's magnum opus The Brothers Karamazov to show that when the devil rules, all hell breaks loose. Instead of this kingdom of violence, O'Connor and Dostoevsky propose a kingdom of love, one that is only possible when the Lord again is king.
Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment presents for the first time an examination of this great novel as a work aimed at winning back “target readers”, young contemporary radicals, from Utilitarianism, nihilism, and Utopian Socialism. Dostoevsky framed the battle in the context of the Orthodox Church and oral tradition versus the West. He relied on knowledge of the Gospels as text received orally, forcing readers to react emotionally, not rationally, and thus undermining the very basis of his opponents’ arguments. Dostoevsky saves Raskol’nikov, underscoring the inadequacy of rational thought and reminding his readers of a heritage discarded at their peril. This volume should be of special interest to secondary and university students, as well as to readers interested in literature, particularly, in Russian literature, and Dostoevsky.
guide the Symbolist movement which dominated Russian literature for the first third of the twentieth century. A major poet, important playwright, and influential literary critic, she was also a sexual rebel who rejected traditional male/female roles as early as the 1890s. Vladimir Zlobin, her secretary and factotum from the time of her emigration to Paris after the revolution until her death in 1945, exposes the consequential inner workings of the literary circle around Gippius. His account of her three most important personal involvements--with her husband, the novelist and critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky; with the unattainable love of her life, the critic Dmitry Filosofov; and with the Devil, w...