In this ground-breaking book, based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch, and thereafter composed and published poems about it. Shrayer painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows...

This pioneering book is the first to present the postwar phenomenon of the New York Group of Ukrainian emigre poets as a case study for exploring cultural and aesthetic ramifications of exile. It focuses on the poets' diasporic and transnational connections both with their country of origin and their adopted homelands, underscoring the group's role in the shaping of the cultural and literary image of Ukraine abroad. Displacements, forced or voluntary, engender states of alterity, states of living in-between, living in the interstices of different cultures and different linguistic realities....

A century ago the Symbolists in Moscow and St. Petersburg dreamed of a fundamental transformation of life in Russia. From their reading of signs in the heavens, these poets, philosophers, and mystics sensed that tsardom was on the threshold of an apocalyptic upheaval. They were influenced by Vladimir Solovyov and Friedrich Nietzsche, but under the impact of the 1905 Revolution they later also subscribed to current radical political ideas. The eventual collision between these dreams and tsarist reality generated enormous intellectual turbulence and the need for substitutes. Not least...

A century ago the Symbolists in Moscow and St. Petersburg dreamed of a fundamental transformation of life in Russia. From their reading of signs in the heavens, these poets, philosophers, and mystics sensed that tsardom was on the threshold of an apocalyptic upheaval. They were influenced by Vladimir Solovyov and Friedrich Nietzsche, but under the impact of the 1905 Revolution they later also subscribed to current radical political ideas. The eventual collision between these dreams and tsarist reality generated enormous intellectual turbulence and the need for substitutes. Not least...

For Russian modernists in search of a past, there were many antiquities of different provenances and varying degrees of prestige from which to choose: Greece or Rome; Byzantium or Egypt. The modernists central to "Our Native Antiquity" located their antiquity in the Eurasian steppes, where they found objects and sites long denigrated as archaeological curiosities. The book follows the exemplary careers of two objects--the so-called "Stone Women" and the kurgan, or burial mound--and the attention paid to them by Russian and Soviet archaeologists, writers, artists, and filmmakers, for...

From the German Black Forest to the Romanian and Ukrainian shores where it flows into the Black Sea, Europe's second longest river connects ten countries, while its watershed covers four more. The Danube serves as an artery of a culturally diverse geographic region, frustrating attempts to divide Europe from non-Europe, and facilitating the flow of economic and cultural forms of international exchange. Yet the river has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention, and what exists too often privileges single disciplinary or national perspectives. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach to...

In the six essays of this book, Ksana Blank examines affinities among works of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and their connections to the visual arts and music. Blank demonstrates that the borders of authorial creativity are not stable and absolute, that talented artists often transcend the classifications and paradigms established by critics. Featured in the volume are works by Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Daniil Kharms, Kazimir Malevich, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

The academic career of internationally recognized Professor of Slavic Studies Magnus Ljunggren spans more than a half century. Here he looks back over his meetings with prominent members of the Russian intelligentsia who from the liberalizing XXII Party Congress in 1961 and down to the present have in various forms struggled with the totalitarian structures of Soviet and post-Soviet society. As a literary scholar Ljunggren has focused on Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg, Russian Symbolism and Russian Silver Age literature and culture. His memoirs reflect on how his study of Symbolism and his...

The modernists central to Our Native Antiquity located their antiquity in the Eurasian steppes, where they found objects and sites long denigrated as archaeological curiosities. The book follows the exemplary careers of two objects - the so-called ""Stone Women"" and the kurgan, or burial mound - and the attention paid to them by Russian and Soviet archaeologists, writers, artists, and filmmakers.

Presents the postwar phenomenon of the New York Group of Ukrainian emigre poets as a case study for exploring cultural and aesthetic ramifications of exile. It focuses on the poets' diasporic and transnational connections both with their country of origin and their adopted homelands, underscoring the group's role in the shaping of the cultural and literary image of Ukraine abroad.