Though published a decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, "The Tragic Menagerie" possesses a sensibility that is modern in its descriptions of a childhood of passionate affections and unsettling revelations. This fictionalized autobiography follows the tomboyish Vera, who counts among her friends bears, wolves, and a wild crane, as well as local peasant girls. Sent to a German boarding school and exiled from her kingdom, Vera turns into a demonic, disobedient student, rejecting a life she finds constraining and artificial. Only when she returns to her natural world can her deeper...

The lives of animals in Russia are intrinsically linked to cultural, political and psychological transformations of the Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras. Other Animals examines the interaction of animals and humans in Russian literature, art, and life from the eighteenth century until the present. The chapters probe a range of human-animal relationships through tales of cruelty, interspecies communion and compassion, and efforts to either overcome or establish the human-animal divide. These essays also explore the unique nature of the Russian experience in this regard.

Four...

Bringing together a team of scholars from the diverse fields of geography, literary studies, and history, this is the first volume to study water as a cultural phenomenon within the Russian/Soviet context. Water in this context is both a cognitive and cultural construct and a geographical and physical phenomenon, representing particular rivers (the Volga, the Chusovaia in the Urals, the Neva) and bodies of water (from Baikal to sacred springs and the flowing water of nineteenth-century estates), but also powerful systems of meaning from traditional cultures and those forged in the radical...