Challenging traditional concepts of poetry and narrative prose, the prose poem is by nature a "subversive" form-and as such has drawn extensive interest in literature and criticism during the past two decades. Russian Minimalism is the first book to apply the theoretical debate on the nature of the prose poem to the history of Russian literature. In it Adrian Wanner uses the notion of minimalism, borrowed from the realm of American visual arts, as a critical tool for a historical investigation of the genesis and development of the Russian prose miniature, going back to the nineteenth and...

A wide-ranging consideration of the nature and significance of Pushkin's African heritage
Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia's greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne...

This provocative work takes issue with the idea that Socialist Realism was mainly the creation of party leaders and was imposed from above on the literati who lived and worked under the Soviet regime. Evgeny Dobrenko, a leading expert on Soviet literature, argues instead--and offers persuasive evidence--that the aesthetic theories underpinning Socialist Realism arose among the writers themselves, born of their proponents' desire for power in the realm of literary policymaking. Accordingly, Dobrenko closely considers the evolution of these theories, deciphering the power relations and social...

Most discussions of sexuality in the work of Dostoevsky have been framed in Freudian terms. But Dostoevsky himself wrote about sexuality from a decidedly pre-Freudian perspective. By looking at the views of human sexual development that were available in Dostoevsky's time and that he, an avid reader and observer of his own social context, absorbed and reacted to, Susanne Fusso gives us a new way of understanding a critical element in the writing of one of Russia's literary masters. Beyond discovering Dostoevsky's own views and representations of sexuality as a reflection of his culture and...

Widely considered the greatest Russian modernist novel, Andrei Bely's "Petersburg" has until now eluded the critical attention that a book of its caliber merits. In "The Stony Dance, " Timothy Langen offers readers a study of Bely's masterpiece unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, clarity, and inclusion of detail--a critical study that is at the same time a meditation on the nature of literary art.
Thoroughly versed in Russian and European modernism, in Bely's biography and writings, and in twentieth-century literary theory, Langen constructs an original analytic scheme for reading...

Seven years after the death of Anton Chekhov, his sister, Maria, wrote to a friend, "You asked for someone who could write a biography of my deceased brother. If you recall, I recommended Iv. Al. Bunin . . . . No one writes better than he; he knew and understood my deceased brother very well; he can go about the endeavor objectively. . . . I repeat, I would very much like this biography to correspond to reality and that it be written by I.A. Bunin."
In About Chekhov Ivan Bunin sought to free the writer from limiting political, social, and aesthetic assessments of his life and work,...

Prince Myshkin is one of Dostoevsky's most perplexing creations. In this study, Bruce A. French presents a provocative interpretation of the religious dimension of Myshkin's goodness from a Bakhtinian perspective.

This book is a study of a Soviet cultural phenomenon of the 1950s through the 1980s known as guitar poetry songs accompanied by guitar and considered poetry in much the same way as those of, for example, Bob Dylan. Platonov s is the most comprehensive book in English to date to analyze guitar poetry, which has rarely received scholarly attention outside of Russia. Going well beyond the conventional, text-centered view of guitar poetry as a form of political or artistic dissent, largely a function of the Cold War climate in which it began, Platonov argues for a more complex understanding of...