Bücher der Reihe Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History

In the six essays of this book, Ksana Blank examines affinities among works of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and their connections to the visual arts and music. Blank demonstrates that the borders of authorial creativity are not stable and absolute, that talented artists often transcend the classifications and paradigms established by critics.

Written at the height of Stalin's first "e;five-year plan"e; for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "e;production"e; novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.

One of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" is renowned for its innovative style and notorious for its subject matter and influence on popular culture. This book guides readers through the intricacies of Nabokov's work and helps them achieve an understanding of his rich artistic design.

Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process, and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether, are presented here in his own words (in translation) and are discussed in the extensive commentaries and introduction. The texts range from 1910 to 1946 and are between two and ninety pages long. There are commentaries on all the texts, as well as a final essay on Pasternak's famous novel, Doctor Zhivago, which is looked at here in the light of what it says on art and inspiration.Although universally acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Pasternak is not yet sufficiently recognized as the highly original and important thinker that he also was. All his life he thought and wrote about the nature and significance of the experience of inspiration, though avoiding the word "e;inspiration"e; where possible as his own views were not the conventional ones. The author's purpose is (a) to make this philosophical aspect of his work better known, and (b) to communicate to readers who cannot read Russian the pleasure and interest of an "e;inspired"e; life as Pasternak experienced it.

This monograph is nothing less than a bold attempt at solving the riddle of Gogol's novel Dead Souls that even inspired a staging of Dead Souls at Schauspiel Stuttgart. Heftrich gives a comprehensive, coherent answer to the question of the novel's meaning by meticulously laying bare its structure. The first part of the monograph is dedicated to one section of Gogol's novel that has been neglected by virtually all critics - a clue that leads to a strictly ethical reading of Gogol's epic. Gogol, as it emerges, constructed Dead Souls strictly according to a moral pattern. It is amazing to discover how flawlessly Dead Souls is built in this regard. The novel thus proves to be a true descendant of medieval romance with its inseparable interrelation between ethics and epics.

This groundbreaking critical biography of Andrei Siniavskii (1925-1997) as a writer in and of his time shows how this subtle and complex author found his way in a society polarised into heroes and villains, patriots and traitors, how he progressed from identification with the value system and ideology of his time to reaction against it, and his dissidence expressed in literary terms.

In the new second volume of Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, the collection of interviews features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky's friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others. This collection of 40 interviews illuminates an intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene. Continuing the discussion begun in the first volume, this series of interviews contains important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. The interviews are published together with many unique photographs from the private archives of the author and the interviewees.

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Volume 1) offers a fascinating record of conversations with poets of various nationalities about Joseph Brodsky: Czeslaw Milosz, Roy Fisher, Lev Loseff, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tomas Venclova, Viktor Krivulin, Alexander Kushner, and Elena Shvarts. In comparison with the first edition of this volume published in 1992 this new second edition is enlarged with three new interviews and a series of previously unpublished unique photographs from the personal archives of the author and the interviewees. The collection combines biographical details with a new and authoritative interpretation of the poetics, style, and ideas of one of the most influential poets to emerge in post-Stalinist Russia. As a poet, essayist, and playwright, Brodsky is widely known and read in the English-speaking world. This book is a superb guide to further study of Brodsky's work both for specialist scholars and general readers who are intoxicated by poetry.

All the Same the Words Don't Go Away brings together twenty-five years of essays and reviews, linked loosely by three themes. The first explores the legacy of Mikhail Bakhtin: his ideas of dialogue and carnival, and the debates ignited by each. The second delves into three "e;master workers"e; of the Russian tradition: Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. In this section, emphasis is comparative: the riddle of Pushkin's life, why "e;Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky,"e; how Chekhov reads Tolstoy, why Kundera dislikes Doestoevsky and Tolstoy dislikes Shakespeare. The final section addresses the transposition of classic literary texts into other media through musical works by Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. Throughout, the fundamental heroes are Pushkin's Tatiana Larina and Boris Godunov. This volume will be of interest to comparativists and students in interdisciplinary humanities.

Now available for the first time in English, Oleg Lekmanov's critically acclaimed Mandelstam presents the maverick Russian poet's life and work to a wider audience and includes the most reliable details of the poet's life, which were recently found and released from the KGB archives. Through his engaging narrative, Lekmanov carries the reader through Mandelstam's early life and education in pre-revolutionary Petersburg, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in Heidelberg and his return to revolutionary Russia. Bold and fearless, he was quoted as saying: "e;Only in Russia do they respect poetry. They even kill you for it."e; Osip Mandelstam compared a writer to a parrot, saying that once his owner tires of him, he will cover his cage with black cloth, which becomes for literature a surrogate of night. In 1938, Mandelstam was arrested and six months later became a statistic: over 500,000 political prisoners were sent to the Gulags in 1938; between 1931 and 1940, over 300,000 prisoners died in the Gulags. One of them was the poet Osip Mandelstam. This is the tragic story of his life, pre-empted by the black cloth of Stalinism.

Lev Tolstoy has held the attention of mankind for well over a century. A supremely talented artist, whose novels and short stories continue to entrance readers all over the world, he was at the same time a fearless moral philosopher who explored and challenged the fundamental bases of human society-political, economic, legal, and cultural. Hugh McLean, Professor Emeritus of Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying and writing about Tolstoy for many years. In these essays he investigates some of the numerous puzzles and paradoxes in the Tolstoyan heritage, engaging both with Tolstoy the artist, author of those incomparable novels, and Tolstoy the thinker, who, from his impregnable outpost at Yasnaya Polyana, questioned the received ideas and beliefs of the whole civilized world. In two concluding essays, "e;Tolstoy beyond Tolstoy,"e; McLean deals with the impact of Tolstoy on such diverse figures as Ernest Hemingway and Isaiah Berlin.

The academic career of Professor Magnus Ljunggren spans more than a half century. Here he looks back over his meetings with leading members of the Russian intelligentsia who, from the liberalizing Twenty-Second Party Congress, in 1961, to the present, have struggled with the totalitarian structures of Soviet and post-Soviet society.

Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts brings together twenty essays by Marcus C. Levitt, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century Russian literature. The essays address a spectrum of works and issues that shaped the development of modern Russian literature, from authorship and philosophy to gender and religion in Russian Enlightenment culture. The first part of the collection explores the career and works of Alexander Sumarokov, who played a formative role in literary life of his day. In the essays of the second part Levitt argues that the Enlightenment's privileging of vision played an especially important role in eighteenth-century Russian self-image, and that its "e;occularcentrism"e; was profoundly shaped by Orthodox religious views. Early Modern Russian Letters offers a series of original and provocative explorations of a vital but little studied period.

Presents the postwar phenomenon of the New York Group of Ukrainian emigre poets as a case study for exploring cultural and aesthetic ramifications of exile. It focuses on the poets diasporic and transnational connections both with their country of origin and their adopted homelands, underscoring the group's role in the shaping of the cultural and literary image of Ukraine abroad.

A fresh and compelling figure, Konevskoi plunged deeply into currents of modern mystical thought and art in the 1890s. This title presents a study of Ivan Konevskoi - poet, thinker, mystic - for many decades the 'lost genius' of Russian modernism.

Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak examines the origin of the nineteen- century Russian novel and challenges the Lukacs-Bakhtin theory of epic. By removing the Russian novel from its European context, the authors reveal that it developed as a means of reconnecting the narrative form with its origins in classical and Christian epic in a way that expressed the Russian desire to renew and restore ancient spirituality. Through this methodology, Griffiths and Rabinowitz dispute Bakhtin's classification of epic as a monophonic and dead genre whose time has passed. Due to its grand themes and cultural centrality, the epic is the form most suited to newcomers or cultural outsiders seeking legitimacy through appropriation of the past. Through readings of Gogol's Dead Souls-a uniquely problematic work, and one which Bakhtin argued was novelistic rather than epic-Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Tolstoy's War and Peace, this book redefines "e;epic"e; and how we understand the sweep of Russian literature as a whole.

Identifies and analyses previously unnoticed or only briefly mentioned "linkages and keystones" found in two highly developed clusters of symbols, arising from Anna's momentous train ride and peasant nightmares, and of allegories, rooted in Vronsky's disastrous steeplechase. Within this labyrinth lies embedded much of the novel's most significant meaning.