Khlebnikov is now recognized as a major Russian poet of the twentieth century, having for years been dismissed as an unintelligible verbal trickster. Cooke provides the first broad study in English of Khlebnikov's writings. The book is both informative and interpretative, and maps the contours of Khlebnikov's still largely uncharted poetic world. This exploration highlights the complex relationship between the poet and his public, examines Khlebnikov's preoccupations with the meaning of language and images of war and conflict, and cites the transformation of a poet-warrior into the...

This wide-ranging study presents an examination of the extraordinary diversity and range of satirical writing in contemporary Russian literature. Through the close analysis of seminal satirical texts written by five Russian and emigre authors in the 1970s and 1980s, Karen Ryan-Hayes demonstrates that formal and thematic parody is pervasive and that it provides additional levels of meaning in contemporary Russian satire. The author focuses on different subgenres of satire and offers practical criticism on each text.

This study is an innovative and controversial study of how the best-known Jews writing in Russian in early Soviet period attempted to resolve the conflict between their cultural identity and their place in Revolutionary Russia. Babel, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Ehrenburg struggled to form creative selves out of the contradictions of origins, outlook and social or ideological pressures. Comparison of literary texts and the visual arts reveals unexpected correspondences in the response to political and cultural change. Sicher provides a fascinating view of intercultural and intertextual...

This book examines the influence of Christianity on the thought and work of the great Russian theorist Mikhael Bakhtin, paying particular attention to the motifs of God the Creator, the Fall, the Incarnation and Christian love. This is the first full-length work to approach Bakhtin from a religious perspective, and introduces the reader to a vitally important but hitherto ignored aspect of his work. In this context Ruth Coates presents readings of Bakhtin very different from those of Marxist and Structuralist critics.

This is the first study of the Russian reception of English literature from Romanticism to Aestheticism. It focuses particularly on the reception by Russian poets of Shelley, Ruskin, Pater, Frazer and Wilde, which gave new impetus to the Russian imagination at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries. Framing this account is a pioneering exploration of the intellectual background to these influences, and a discussion of Russian conceptions of national identity, literary influence and the origins of comparative literary history.

In the centenary year of Nabokov's birth, eleven of the world's foremost Nabokov scholars offer original essays on the writer and his fiction. They cover a broad range of topics and approaches, from close readings of major texts to penetrating discussions of the relationship between Nabokov's personal beliefs and experiences and his art. There is a first glimpse at a recently published work, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, and a fresh perspective on Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita.

This is the first full-length study of the huge popularity and cultural impact of fortune telling in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present. It examines the ways in which popular fortune telling books found acceptance among urban and literate Russians, the role of women in fortune telling, and the function of fortune telling in their culture. It goes on to consider the relationship between urban fortune telling and traditional oral culture, and discusses why fortune telling continues as a powerful force in modern Russian society.

N.M. Karamzin (1766-1826) was the foremost Russian representative of the late eighteenth-century Sentimentalist movement. In this study, Gitta Hammarberg makes use of recent advances in literary theory (especially those based on the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov) in order to develop a new theory of Sentimentalist literature, which she applies to Karamzin's prose fiction. Professor Hammarberg situates Sentimentalism in its historical context, as a reflection of contemporary shifts in world view, a reaction against the Neo-Classicist view of literature, and a vehicle for legitimizing prose...

The Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) belongs to a Russian philosophical tradition that includes such figures as Vladimir Solov'ev, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Boris Pasternak. This study investigates the interrelation of themes, imagery, and the use of language in his prose. Thomas Seifrid shows how Platonov was particularly influenced by Russian utopian thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how his world view was also shaped by its implicit dialogue with the "official" Soviet philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, and later with Stalinist utopianism.