Bücher veröffentlicht von Academic Studies Press

End of Days is an Israeli Orthodox Jew's attempt to provide a Jewish faith-based alternative to ethnic superiority in Israel, and a theological political framework for those wishing to promote equality in Israel and Palestine.

Krzemien's book delves into the life of Solomon Dubno (1738?1813), a devout Polish Jew who was pivotal to Moses Mendelssohn's project of translating the Bible into German. It explores Dubno's role, his library's influence, and his poetic endeavors to showcase the beauty of Hebrew. The work offers a nuanced image of the early Haskalah movement.

End of Days is an Israeli Orthodox Jew's attempt to provide a Jewish faith-based alternative to ethnic superiority in Israel, and a theological political framework for those wishing to promote equality in Israel and Palestine.

This is the first volume to reconstruct and examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives (intellectual history; literary history and theory; comparative literature; translation studies; diaspora studies); the book is a vital contribution to current debates on world literature in and beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies.

This book explores the various rationales offered by Jewish groups in late antiquity for the authority of the Divine Law. While Second Temple groups tended to look towards philosophy or metaphysics to justify the Divine Law's authority, the tannaim formulated legal arguments. These arguments link to a set of issues regarding the tannaim's conception of Divine Law and of Israel's election.

This book demonstrates how the Russian thought and literature of the 18th ? 19th centuries influenced Jewish thought and Hebrew literature. Absorption of ideological influences is a universal phenomenon that is instrumental to progress and cultural development, and it is accepted in Jewish culture as well.

Jewish Culture and Creativity honors the wide-ranging scholarship of Prof. Michael Fishbane with contributions of his students on subjects that cover the gamut of Jewish studies, from biblical and rabbinic literature to medieval and modern Jewish culture, and concluding with case studies of the creative application of Prof. Fishbane's thought and theology in contemporary Jewish life. The innovative scholarship represented in this volume offers critical new perspectives from antiquity to contemporary Judaism and will serve as a stimulus for new directions in and beyond the field of Jewish studies.

Polish-Jewish Re-Remembering addresses Polish-Jewish relations, including the impact of Jews on the development of national culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their presence in social life, and relations between Jews and non-Jews. The book consists of nineteenth chapters on Polish, Jewish and Polish-Jewish Literature from the interwar period to the early twenty-first century.

This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol's absurdist masterpiece "The Nose." Part I focuses on numerous instances of the writer's wordplay, which is meant to surprise and delight the reader, but which often is lost in English translations. It traces Gogol's descriptions of everyday life in St. Petersburg, familiar to the writer's contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical interpretations of the story in Gogol scholarship from the time of its publication to the present, as well as its connections to the works of Shostakovich, Kafka, Dalí, and Kharms.

This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov--poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.

All Shook Up is the first full-length study to explore how the Soviet government and citizens responded to major disasters. Although traditional disaster studies focus on scientific aspects, All Shook Up looks at political repercussions and social opportunities that emerged after disasters. By juxtaposing the response to earthquakes in the Central Asian republics to nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine, Nigel Raab shows how Soviet citizens not only rebuilt devastated cities but also experimented with new values. After the Tashkent earthquake in 1966, architects experimented with Western design and youth underwent their own version of a sexual revolution. This study of Soviet disasters challenges stereotypical representations of the Soviet Union as a monolithic state.

Deviant Women, first examines the emergence of the discipline of criminology in early Soviet Russia, tracing the development of principles and theories--particularly that of female deviance--and highlighting the ways in which criminologists, a diverse cohort of jurists, doctors, sociologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, statisticians, and forensic experts, conducted innovative social science research under the constraints of Bolshevik ideology. It then turns to criminologists' analyses of female crime, exploring their attitudes concerning sexuality, geography, and class. Concluding with a close study of infanticide, the most "typical" crime committed by women, Deviant Women discusses the social attitudes revealed through the professional discussions of this crime. Throughout, Kowalsky focuses on the position of women in early Soviet society, revealing criminologists' understandings of female crime and how their attitudes helped shape the development of social and behavioral norms in revolutionary Russia.

"Dew on the Grass": The Poetics of Inbetweenness in Chekhov is the first comprehensive and systematic study to focus on the poetic dimensions of Anton Chekhov's prose and drama. Using the concept of "inbetweenness," this book reconceptualizes the central aspects of Chekhov's style, from his use of language to the origins of his artistic worldview. Radislav Lapushin offers a fresh interpretive framework for the analysis of Chekhov's individual works and his ¿uvre as a whole.

The volume combines a narrative of events from 1914-1918 with an overarching argument about the relationship between state failure, social collapse, and decolonization. Imperial Apocalypse provides a readable account of military activity and political change throughout this turbulent period. It argues that the sudden rise of groups seeking national self-determination in the borderlands of the empire was the consequence of state failure, not its cause. At the same time, we see how the destruction of state institutions and the spread of violence led to a collapse of traditional social bonds and the emergence of a more dangerous and militant political atmosphere.

In this richly researched and highly original study, Alexander M. Martin explores conservatism in Russian thought, politics, and culture during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Tracing the indigenous and foreign origins of conservative ideology through a wide range of sources, he shows how the Russians reacted to threats posed by the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and how this reaction shaped state policy and national consciousness. Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries is the first in-depth probe of the origins of Russian conservatism. It will appeal not only to Russian historian but to all readers concerned with political culture and the history of conservative thought.

When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky's work, reading through the facts--the text--of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand. In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in "Poor Folk"? Does "White Nights" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost--and what is won--in "The Gambler"? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in "Crime and Punishment", in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in "Demons," is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their unaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.

This subject of this memoir is why and how history and communism combined to animate and shape the life of a New York-born, Jewish American whose father joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1939. It spans three continents and roughly half a century dominated by the ideologies at the heart of the Cold War. It recreates journeys of discovery and self-discovery, first as an undergraduate at Columbia University, then a graduate student at Oxford, and then in Soviet archives, the coalfields of eastern Ukraine, and newly independent Uzbekistan. The memoir reveals not only fascination with but also affection for the Soviet people as they contended with actually existing communism and its supersession.

The idea of abolishing death was one of the most influential myth-making concepts expressed in Russian literature from 1900 to 1930. In this book Dr. Masing-Delic finds the seeds of this extraordinary concept in the erosion of traditional religion in late-nineteenth-century Russia. Influenced by the new power of scientific inquiry, humankind appropriated various divine attributes one after the other, including omnipotence and omniscience, but eventually even aiming toward the realization of individual, physical immortality, and thus aspiring to equality with God. This aspiration, expressed in the ideas of Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Fedorov and in the renewed concepts of Gnosticism, brought such different writers as Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok, Fedor Sologub, Nikolai Ognev and Nikolai Zabolotsky together in a single space of the myth of the final victory over death.

Economies of Feeling offers new explanations for the fantastical plots of mad or blocked ambition that set the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition in motion. Jillian Porter compares the conceptual history of social ambition in post-Napoleonic France and post-Decembrist Russia and argues that the dissonance between foreign and domestic understandings of this economic passion shaped the literature of Nicholas I's reign (1825 --1855). Porter shows how, for Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Faddei Bulgarin, ambition became a staging ground for experiments with transnational literary exchange. In its encounters with the celebrated Russian cultural value of hospitality and the age-old vice of miserliness, ambition appears both timely and anachronistic, suspiciously foreign and disturbingly Russian--it challenges readers to question the equivalence of local and imported words, feelings, and forms. Economies of Feeling examines founding texts of nineteenth-century Russian prose alongside nonliterary materials from which they drew energy--from French clinical diagnoses of "ambitious monomania" to the various types of currency that proliferated under Nicholas I. It thus contributes fresh and fascinating insights into Russian characters' impulses to attain rank and to squander, counterfeit, and hoard. Porter's interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars of comparative as well as Russian literature.

After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history, despite the central role he had played in the cultural life of Russia's northern capital for nearly twenty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writings have gradually been rediscovered in Russia, but with his archives scattered between Russia, France, and the USA, the project of reconstructing the story of his life has been a complex task. This book, the first full biography of Zamiatin in any language, draws upon his extensive correspondence and other documents in order to provide an account of his life which explores his intimate preoccupations, as well as uncovering the political and cultural background to many of his works. It reveals a man of strong will and high principles, who negotiated the political dilemmas of his day with great shrewdness.

Dostoevsky attached introductions to his most challenging narratives. Despite his clever attempts to call his readers' attention to these introductions, they have been neglected as an object of study for over 150 years. First Words offers the first systematic study of Dostoevsky's introductions.

The diversity of topics under consideration--such as the culture of dance in Eugene Onegin, the seriality of Dostoevsky's novels, the reader's perception of Anna Karenina--are united by an approach defined by a detailed analysis of the texts combined with a study of the sociocultural context in which these great works were created, published, censored and conceptualized.

A hundred years is the period long enough to talk about Russian-Israeli literature as a historically consistent, though quite an indeterminate community. Not being a historical study, Roman Katsman's new book subtly outlines one of the magnetic lines of this community--the search for an answer to the main question of modernity--"what is reality?", as well as the search for the real, which makes the core of the Jewish existence. Today, just like a hundred years ago, the success of this search depends on how well Russian-Israeli literature can overcome fears and temptations of the Russian melancholy and the Israeli marginality. Fighting for its existence in unique conditions, it chooses sophisticated forms of transforming its double cultural unbelonging into the paradoxical philosophical realism that can be perfectly comprehended only today, with the benefits of postmodernism appropriated and left behind. At the same time, despite its peculiar nature, Russian-Israeli literature shares the fundamental trend of the world literature, namely its transition to virtual, web-based, augmented reality.

The volume contains essays and reviews written over thirty years, linked loosely by three themes. First is the global resonance of Mikhail Bakhtin as moral philosopher, theorist of dialogue, and cultural totem. How does his worldview complement that of his friendly rivals the formalists (and later semioticians), and which aspects of his value-system have been most cogently criticized? Second is an application of Bakhtinian principles of transposition to successive musicalized Russian classics (among them Pushkin's and Meyerhold's Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky's and Prokofiev's Eugene Onegin, Prokofiev's War and Peace, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Pushkin's and Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka). A final theme is the creative--or capricious--reading of one literary master by another master, much later in time: Tolstoy's reading of Shakespeare, Nabokov's reading of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Krzhizhanovsky's reading of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw. Great writers, like great composers, absorb and transform earlier greatness into a new synthesis, and it is this activity that is commemorated in this volume.

In The Depths of Russia, Yale anthropologist and historian Douglas Rogers tells the history of Russian oil from the perspective of the Perm region of the Urals. From the discovery of world's first socialist oil in 1929 to the oil-fueled social and cultural politics of the 2000s, he shows how Permian oil illuminates the place of oil in the modern world in new ways. Rogers pays particular attention to the nature of oil as a material substance and to its role in the formation and interaction of states and corporations in socialist and capitalist contexts. The book is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research in the Perm region.

Studies of Eastern European literature have largely confined themselves to a single language, culture, or nationality. In this highly original book, Glaser shows how writers working in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish during much of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were in intense conversation with one another. The marketplace was both the literal locale at which members of these different societies and cultures interacted with one another and a rich subject for representation in their art. It is commonplace to note the influence of Gogol on Russian literature, but Glaser shows him to have been a profound influence on Ukrainian and Yiddish literature as well. And she shows how Gogol must be understood not only within the context of his adopted city of St. Petersburg but also that of his native Ukraine. As Ukrainian and Yiddish literatures developed over this period, they were shaped by their geographical and cultural position on the margins of the Russian Empire. As distinctive as these writers may seem from one another, they are further illuminated by an appreciation of their common relationship to Russia. Glaser's book paints a far more complicated portrait than scholars have traditionally allowed of Jewish (particularly Yiddish) literature in the context of Eastern European and Russian culture.

A woman wearing a ballgown singing in the snow for returning ski troops; a technician's tears ruining a master recording of a new wartime song; fresh recruits spontaneously standing and doffing their caps to a new song, thereby creating the new wartime anthem. This well researched, multi-faceted book depicts the relationship between song and society during World War II in the USSR. Chapter topics range from the creation and distribution of the songs to how the public received and shaped them. The body of song that came out of that era created a true cultural legacy which reflected both the hearts of the individuals fighting as well as the narrative of the party and state in bringing the nation to victory.

One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century -- from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of reform to the mature masterpieces of Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the paintings of the Wanderers, Repin chief among them. By examining the classics of the tradition, Brunson explores the emergence of multiple realisms from the gaps, disruptions, and doubts that accompany the self-conscious project of representing reality. These manifestations of realism are united not by how they look or what they describe, but by their shared awareness of the fraught yet critical task of representation. By tracing the engagement of literature and painting with aesthetic debates on the sister arts, Brunson argues for a conceptualization of realism that transcends artistic media. Russian Realisms integrates the lesser-known tradition of Russian painting with the familiar masterpieces of Russia's great novelists, highlighting both the common ground in their struggles for artistic realism and their cultural autonomy and legitimacy. This erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history, and nineteenth-century realist movements.

In the early 1990s, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc faced an urgent need to reform the systems by which they delivered broad, basic social welfare to their citizens. Inherited systems were inefficient and financially unsustainable. Linda J. Cook here explores the politics and policy of social welfare from 1990 to 2004 in the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Most of these countries, she shows, tried to institute reforms based on a liberal paradigm of reduced entitlements and subsidies, means-testing, and privatization. But these proposals provoked opposition from pro-welfare interests, and the politics of negotiating change varied substantially from one political arena to another. In Russia, for example, liberalizing reform was blocked for a decade. Only as Vladimir Putin rose to power did the country change its inherited welfare system. Cook finds that the impact of economic pressures on welfare was strongly mediated by domestic political factors, including the level of democratization and balance of pro- and anti-reform political forces. Postcommunist welfare politics throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, she shows, are marked by the large role played by bureaucratic welfare stakeholders who were left over from the communist period and, in weak states, by the development of informal processes in social sectors. In the early 1990s, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc faced an urgent need to reform the systems by which they delivered broad, basic social welfare to their citizens. Inherited systems were inefficient and financially unsustainable. Linda J. Cook here explores the politics and policy of social welfare from 1990 to 2004 in the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Most of these countries, she shows, tried to institute reforms based on a liberal paradigm of reduced entitlements and subsidies, means-testing, and privatization. But these proposals provoked opposition from pro-welfare interests, and the politics of negotiating change varied substantially from one political arena to another. In Russia, for example, liberalizing reform was blocked for a decade. Only as Vladimir Putin rose to power did the country change its inherited welfare system. Cook finds that the impact of economic pressures on welfare was strongly mediated by domestic political factors, including the level of democratization and balance of pro- and anti-reform political forces. Postcommunist welfare politics throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, she shows, are marked by the large role played by bureaucratic welfare stakeholders who were left over from the communist period and, in weak states, by the development of informal processes in social sectors.