Bücher veröffentlicht von Academic Studies Press

From the time the word kul'tura entered the Russian language in the early nineteenth century, Russian arts and letters have thrived on controversy. At any given time several versions of culture have coexisted in the Russian public sphere. The question of what makes something or someone distinctly Russian was at the core of cultural debates in nineteenth-century Russia and continues to preoccupy Russian society to the present day. When Art Makes News examines the development of a public discourse on national self-representation in nineteenth-century Russia, as it was styled by the visual arts and popular journalism. Katia Dianina tells the story of the missing link between high art and public culture, revealing that art became the talk of the nation in the second half of the nineteenth century in the pages of mass-circulation press

The destructive power of obsessive love was a defining subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature. In Febris Erotica, Sobol argues that Russian writers were deeply preoccupied with the nature of romantic relationships and were persistent in their use of lovesickness not simply as a traditional theme but as a way to address pressing philosophical, ethical, and ideological concerns through a recognizable literary trope. Sobol examines stereotypes about the damaging effects of romantic love and offers a short history of the topos of lovesickness in Western literature and medicine.

This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory.

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by "world literature" as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided-and continues to provide-a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization.

What forces shaped the twentieth-century world? Capitalism and communism are usually seen as engaged in a fight-to-the-death during the Cold War. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism. Karl Gerth argues that despite the socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, Communist Party policies actually developed a variety of capitalism and expanded consumerism. This negated the goals of the Communist Revolution across the Mao era (1949-1976) down to the present. Through topics related to state attempts to manage what people began to desire - wristwatches and bicycles, films and fashion, leisure travel and Mao badges - Gerth challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism, communism, and countries conventionally labeled as socialist. In so doing, his provocative history of China suggests how larger forces related to the desire for mass-produced consumer goods reshaped the twentieth-century world and remade people's lives.

This book identifies the crucial variables as classic Japanese forms of socio-political organization: the "circles of compensation." These cooperative groupings of economic, political, and bureaucratic interests dictate corporate and individual responses to such critical issues as investment and innovation; at the micro level, they explain why individuals can be decidedly cautious on their own, yet prone to risk-taking as a collective. Kent E. Calder examines how these circles operate in seven concrete areas, from food supply to consumer electronics, and deals in special detail with the influence of Japan's changing financial system. The result is a comprehensive overview of Japan's circles of compensation as they stand today, and a road map for broadening them in the future.

Words, silences, and narratives as vehicles are always in flux, always fueling us, precipitating actions both virtuous and criminal, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, sublime and ridiculous. Dostoevsky, more than any other writer except perhaps Shakespeare, supplies an unending source of inspiration for the full sweep of human action, thought, emotion, and belief in all their contradictory manifestations and combinations. Dostoevsky's journeys onto these terrains are without exception unfinished, always in process, alive and precariously so, even as those inspired by him may find for themselves completion, rationales, and answers. His readers have given various names to the quality of completion embedded within uncertainty that his oeuvre conveys and which can then serve to engender religious, philosophical, or nakedly political discourses and responses, some of which would no doubt surprise, even horrify him.Dostoevsky, however, continues to stand apart; his written words, silences, and narratives expressing, through their embodiment in characters, his own unfinished journey. Ivan Karamazov's rebellious philosopher maybe have walked his quadrillion kilometers in the dark, but their mutual creator still travels on.

Born into a low-level literati family in the port city of Ningbo, the seventeenth-century Chinese Christian convert Zhu Zongyuan likely never left his home province. Yet Zhu nonetheless led a remarkably globally connected life. His relations with the outside world, ranging from scholarly activities to involvement with globalizing Catholicism, put him in contact with a complex and contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces. In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled, Dominic Sachsenmaier explores the mid-seventeenth-century world and the worldwide flows of ideas through the lens of Zhu's life, combining the local, regional, and global. Taking particular aspects of Zhu's multiple belongings as a starting point, Sachsenmaier analyzes the contexts that framed his worlds as he balanced a local life and his border-crossing faith. At the local level, the book pays attention to the intellectual, political, and social environments of late Ming and early Qing society, including Confucian learning and the Manchu conquest, questioning the role of ethnic and religious identities. At the global level, it considers how individuals like Zhu were situated within the history of organizations and power structures such as the Catholic Church and early modern empires amid larger transformations and encounters. A strikingly original work, this book is a major contribution to East Asian, transnational, and global history, with important implications for historical approaches and methodologies.

Barnett R. Rubin, one of the world's leading scholars of contemporary conflict and politics in Afghanistan, offers unique insights into the country's turbulent history, gleaned from four decades of work as a scholar and practitioner for both the United Nations and the United States. After situating the formation of modern Afghanistan in its long-term historical context, Rubin focuses on the period of armed conflict that began in 1978. The book analyzes the local, national, regional, and global shifts on social structure and the economy that perpetuated violent conflict while transforming its structure. Rubin's own analysis is complemented by guest chapters by world experts on Afghanistan's aid economy, drug industry, and the Taliban.

Until now, it has been accepted that the Turkish Straits--the Russian fleet's gateway to the Mediterranean--were a key factor in shaping Russian policy in the years leading to World War I. Control of the Straits had always been accepted as the major priority of Imperial Russia's foreign policy. In this powerfully argued revisionist history, Ronald Bobroff exposes the true Russian concern before the outbreak of war: the containment of German aggression. Based on extensive new research, Bobroff provides fascinating new insights into Russia's state development before the revolution, examining the policies and personal correspondence of its policy makers. And through his detailed examination of the rivalries and alliances of the Triple Entente, he sheds new light on European diplomacy at the beginning of the twentieth century.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, much of its Jewish population emigrated, but those who remained were often disconnected from Judaism. It was into this vacuum that Hillel stepped, gradually building a network of Hillel centers across the Former Soviet Union, serving tens of thousands of Jewish students and creating a Jewish future in the FSU. Rabbi Yossie Goldman led Hillel's efforts to rebuild Jewish identity among university students in the FSU. In Let My People Grow, Goldman tells the story of Hillel in the FSU from its humble beginnings in Moscow and its first steps and missteps in the chaos that followed the fall of communism through to nourishing an indigenous Jewish leadership that sustains the community to this day. In a journey in time across the breath of the FSU with its myriad languages, cultures and Jewish communities, Goldman tells this amazing story. As Goldman tells us: "The best way to predict the future is to create it."

In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.

This three-volume book investigates the Russian transformations of one of the central concepts of Greek Christology, the self-humiliation or kenosis of Christ. The author applies rhetoric (paradox, metaphor, metonymy) as a means to elucidate mechanisms of theological persuasion and to trace the representations of the humiliated Christ and his imitations in various media from liturgy and iconology to everyday practice and literary fiction. The exploration of post-Christian literature of the 19th and 20th century (N. Chernyshevskii, M. Gor'kii, N. Ostrovskii, Ven. Erofeev, Vl. Sorokin) demonstrates the existence of a kenotic Christology after Christianity.

In fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary Russia, a group of self-educated workers produced a large body of poetry and prose in which they attempted to comprehend their rapidly changing world. Witnesses to wars and revolution, these men and women grappled on paper with the nature of civilization and the imperatives of ethical truth. In a strikingly original approach to Russian culture, Mark D. Steinberg listens to their words, which are little known today. The results of their literary creativity, he finds, were frequently not what the new Soviet order was expecting from its workers, despite its celebration of the notion of a proletarian art.

In this highly original interdisciplinary study incorporating close readings of literary texts and philosophical argumentation, Henry W. Pickford develops a theory of meaning and expression in art intended to counter the meaning skepticism most commonly associated with the theories of Jacques Derrida.Pickford arrives at his theory by drawing on the writings of Wittgenstein to develop and modify the insights of Tolstoy's philosophy of art. Pickford shows how Tolstoy's encounter with Schopenhauer's thought on the one hand provided support for his ethical views but on the other hand presented a problem, exemplified in the case of music, for his aesthetic theory, a problem that Tolstoy did not successfully resolve. Wittgenstein's critical appreciation of Tolstoy's thinking, however, not only recovers its viability but also constructs a formidable position within contemporary debates concerning theories of emotion, ethics, and aesthetic expression

Women have participated in war throughout history, but their experience in Russia during the First World War was truly exceptional. Between the war's beginning and the October Revolution of 1917, approximately 6,000 women answered their country's call as the army was faced with insubordination and desertion in the ranks while the provisional government prepared for a new offensive. These courageous women became media stars throughout Europe and America, but were brushed aside by Soviet chroniclers and until now have been largely neglected by history.

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and motion pictures, among other technological advances, proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, speed transformed contemporary reality, generating new possibilities not only for everyday existence, but also for modernist culture. From Manhattan to Milan to Moscow, the rise of modernism coincided with a precipitous acceleration in the pace of human experience that may artists celebrated. Speed was soon aestheticized and converted from an ordinary, physical concept into a unique source of inspiration. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia's avant-garde movement with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for its revolutionary experimentation. Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930 presents a detailed examination of the ideas and images of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, painting, and cinema. In probing this cultural phenomenon, which began in the early 1910s and continued to the late 1920s when formal innovation in the arts was overtaken by Stalin's Five-Year Plans for rapid Soviet industrialization, Fast Forward explores how the idea of speed propelled the nation's arts toward abstraction as well as toward the ideal of a dynamic, streamlined future. Speed, used as a powerful conceptual means for breaking down the figurative stasis of traditional representational art, provided the basis for a comprehensive reevaluation of everyday reality. Fostering a broad understanding of velocity, Russian avant-garde poets, painters, and filmmakers raced to establish a new artistic and social reality.

A team of University of Toronto sociologists examined Fyodor Dostoyevsky's life to determine the origins of his gambling addiction and draw interesting parallels with the experience of modern day gamblers that they interviewed and took bibliographical accounts from in their study of Toronto area residents.

In this sweeping study, Julie Hessler traces the invention and evolution of socialist trade, the progressive constriction of private trade, and the development of consumer habits from the 1917 revolution to Stalin's death in 1953. The book places trade and consumption in the context of debilitating economic crises. Although Soviet leaders, and above all, Stalin, identified socialism with the modernization of retailing and the elimination of most private transactions, these goals conflicted with the economic dynamics that produced shortages and with the government's bureaucratic, repressive, and socially discriminatory political culture.

The book includes interpretations that offer an alternative reading of Nabokov's texts, looking for the inner connections of the writer's oeuvre, in the microstructures of motifs, nodes, and patterns. The concept of the erotext, combining the bliss of the textual and the sexual detaches analyses from reading literature as a copy of life. Nabokov's paths of initiation lead the reader to transcend boundaries: facets of Ego and of imaginary norms, the limits of space and time, to the threshold of the otherworldly -- towards ecstasy. Being a polyglot writer with synaesthesia, he savored words, knew their physics and music, visualized word forms, blended hybrid languages. By indulging in associations, he brought things to life, and exposed the vulgarity of 'Communazist clowns'. Shifts reveal hidden layers, maintain tensions, and create new qualities. This shift can be understood in terms of the identity in the crisis of exile, multilinguality and synesthesia of the author, the provocation of ethics and eroticism, mirroring multiplications and dreams, and the loosening of the role of the author. In the shifts shattering the foundations of normativity Nabokov, the forerunner of the Postmodern is revealed.

The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century: challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.

This book analyzes how literary fiction depicts multilingual worlds by incorporating multiple languages into the text. Taking as case studies several contemporary novels as well as Leo Tolstoy's nineteenth-century classic War and Peace, it explores how reading becomes a translingual process.

I. Pulner's dissertation, Jewish Wedding Ceremonies (1940), features an impressive volume of field ethnographic materials. Unfortunately, Pulner never got a chance to either defend or publish his work: he passed away in besieged Leningrad. The researcher's text is supplemented by articles on his life and his dissertation, I. Pulner as the Researcher by D. Yalen and Pulner's Papers in the Russian Ethnographic Museum by A. Ivanov, as well as musicological essay Music of the Ashkenazi Wedding: Terra Incognita contributed by E. Hazdan and the article Jewish Wedding Ceremonies in Podolia and Bessarabia by V. Dymshits, based on the insights gained during the recent expeditions.

This is a detailed study of the development of the Russian small arms industry. Humiliated in the Crimean War, Russia turned to the United States for help. Using archival sources, Bradley, author of Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Univ. of California Pr., 1985), describes the role of famous gunsmiths like Colt, Smith, and Wesson; they provided Russia with machinery, tools, production techniques, and even workers to build an independent arms industry. Assimilation was only partially successful; an inflexible economy hindered military modernization. A 30-page bibliography and 40 pages of footnotes testify to Bradley's meticulous research and academic style. Recommended for specialists.

Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science,by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov's scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions

From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and Harry Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, Hasegawa brings to light the real reasons Japan surrendered. From Washington to Moscow to Tokyo and back again, he shows us a high-stakes diplomatic game as Truman and Stalin sought to outmaneuver each other in forcing Japan's surrender; as Stalin dangled mediation offers to Japan while secretly preparing to fight in the Pacific; as Tokyo peace advocates desperately tried to stave off a war party determined to mount a last-ditch defense; and as the Americans struggled to balance their competing interests of ending the war with Japan and preventing the Soviets from expanding into the Pacific.

The path to modernity was late in Russia, and as the country, absorbing western thought and art at a gallop, hurried to catch up in the nineteenth century, it produced cultural content about the modern individual unmatched in any other society. While in the process of creating Russian psychological prose in its mature form, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy converse through their texts. Behind the scenes, they criticize each other, but also grow their own prose in response to each other. Through close readings and other means, this book lays bare conversations about childhood, evil, and other themes. All three writers explore how self-examination changes us and has negative as well as positive effects.

Barbara Walker examines the Russian literary circle, a feature of Russian intellectual and cultural life from tsarist times into the early Soviet period, through the life story of one of its liveliest and most adored figures, the poet Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932). From 1911 until his death, Voloshin led a circle in the Crimean village of Koktebel' that was a haven for such literary luminaries as Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Drawing upon the anthropological theories of Victor Turner, Walker depicts the literary circle of late Imperial Russia as a contradictory mix of idealism and "communitas," on the one hand, and traditional Russian patterns of patronage and networking, on the other. While detailing the colorful history of Voloshinov's circle in the pre- and postrevolutionary decades, the book demonstrates that the literary circle and its leaders played a key role in integrating the intelligentsia into the emerging ethos of the Soviet state.

Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe-one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture.