The essays in this collection range widely not only over Karolina Pavlova's oeuvre but also in their analytical stances. The volume includes close poetic and prosodic analysis, literary history, gender studies, intertextual comparison and biography.

The past fifteen years have seen an important shift in the way scholars look at socialist realism. Where it was seen as a straitjacket imposed by the Stalinist regime, it is now understood to be an aesthetic movement in its own right, one whose internal logic had to be understood if it was to be criticized. International specialists remain divided, however, over the provenance of Soviet aesthetic ideology, particularly over the role of the avant-garde in its emergence.

In The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, Irina Gutkin brings together the best work written on...

Elizaveta Polonskaja (1890-1969), was a poet, translator, children's writer, journalist and noted memoirist. This text attempts to restore the neglected poet to her rightful place in the Russian literary tradition, while exploring the the politics that served to obscure her.

Mikhail Zoshchenko was one of the most popular and contentious Russian writers in the period from 1920 to 1950. Scholars and critics have long enlisted Zoshchenko to fight the cultural battles of early Soviet history, the Cold War, and even the glasnost era. In "The Politics of Reception, " Gregory Carleton analyzes how and why Zoshchenko's legacy has become a battleground for competing ideological interests.

In a 1994 "American Scholar "article, Andrew Wachtel wrote of Ivan Bunin: " He] is undoubtedly the greatest Russian writer whom no one reads." With the collapse of communism, however, Bunin's works are undergoing a revival in both Russia and the West. As enthusiastic as readers and publishers have been, scholarship has not kept pace with this "rediscovery," in part due to the many contradictions in Bunin's writing, in part because much past criticism has been used to advanced the critic's own view of what they love or hate about "modern" life.
In "If You See the Buddha, " Thomas Gaiton...

Using Russia's most prolific writer, Andrei Bolotov, as a focal point, this text offers an analysis of the pastoral impulse in 18th- and early 19th-century Russian culture. The study also focuses on the tensions that undercut and qualified this experiment in idyllicism.

At the turn of the century, there appeared in the Western world a stream of literary and dramatic works that confused their audiences to an unprecedented degree. Many of these works continue to confuse to this day and are avoided by theatre managers wishing to fill seats. Choosing for analysis a selection of five early-twentieth-century Russian plays, this book examines in detail the techniques, devices, and elements that the playwrights applied in order to undercut the traditional dramatic and theatrical expectations of their audiences.
Kot studies experimental dramas by Gippius,...

Of a noble and distinguished family disenfranchised by the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Trubetskoi (1892-1937) alone remmained in Russia, and suffered the consequences.His life and experiences are well documented in this remarkable volume, a selection of his writings that reflects his comfortable prewar existence and his post-revolutionary poverty, uncertainty, and displacement, all conveyed with humor and ironic detachment. Including selections from Trubetskoi's memoirs, his letters from exile in Uzbekistan, and his hunting stories, the chapters of this volume offer autobiographical...

Thomas P. Hodge has produced the first literary-historical study of the art-song enterprise in Russia's Golden Age. "A Double Garland" investigates the interrelationship of poetry and music in Russia, specifically the relations between poets and composers, from 1800 to 1850. Hodge focuses on three major composers of art songs: Alyab'ev, Verstovskii, and Glinka. He surveys their choices of text and, after some preliminary metrical and structural analysis, proceeds to a detailed consideration of the dynamics of poet/composer interaction from various points of view. Hodge presents both the major...

"The art of writing badly" is a phrase the Russian writer Valentin Kataev coined to describe the work that came out of the mauvist movement in Russia-a style of writing that consciously challenged Soviet dogma. In this book, Richard Borden discusses the cultural and political context from which these authors emerged and the development of "bad writing."
Beginning with a close examination of the work of Kataev, the best-known progenitor of "bad writing," Borden then broadens his study to include the "mauvist creations" of post-Stalinist writers Aksenov, Bitov, Sokolov, Limonov, Evgeny...