What is a nightmare as a psychological experience, a literary experiment and a cultural project? Why has experiencing a nightmare under the guise of reading a novel, watching a film or playing a video game become a persistent requirement of contemporary mass culture? By answering these questions, which have not been addressed by literary criticism and cultural studies, we can interpret anew the texts of classic authors. Charles Maturin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Howard Philips Lovecraft and Victor Pelevin carry out bold experiments on their heroes and readers as they seek...

This book examines the staggering popularity of early-twentieth-century Russian detective serials. Traditionally maligned as "Pinkertonovshchina," these appropriations of American and British detective stories featuring Nat Pinkerton, Nick Carter, Sherlock Holmes, Ethel King, and scores of other sleuths swept the Russian reading market in successive waves between 1907 and 1917, and famously experienced a "red" resurgence in the 1920s under the aegis of Nikolai Bukharin. The book presents the first holistic view of "Pinkertonovshchina" as a phenomenon, and produces a working model of...

An Intellectual Biography of N.A. Rozhkov is the first English language study to follow Russia's most gifted and important historian to emerge from the school of V.O. Kliuchevskii through the transformative decades that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rozhkov's early philosophical influences are examined to explain his radicalisation from middle-class intellectual academic to Leninist-Bolshevik to Menshevik social-democrat. His Marxist-socialist beliefs landed him in gaol several times and eventually he was exiled to Siberia for a decade where he was able to refine his...