This wide-ranging study presents an examination of the extraordinary diversity and range of satirical writing in contemporary Russian literature. Through the close analysis of seminal satirical texts written by five Russian and emigre authors in the 1970s and 1980s, Karen Ryan-Hayes demonstrates that formal and thematic parody is pervasive and that it provides additional levels of meaning in contemporary Russian satire. The author focuses on different subgenres of satire and offers practical criticism on each text.

The Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) belongs to a Russian philosophical tradition that includes such figures as Vladimir Solov'ev, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Boris Pasternak. This study investigates the interrelation of themes, imagery, and the use of language in his prose. Thomas Seifrid shows how Platonov was particularly influenced by Russian utopian thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how his world view was also shaped by its implicit dialogue with the "official" Soviet philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, and later with Stalinist utopianism.

This is the first study of the Russian reception of English literature from Romanticism to Aestheticism. It focuses particularly on the reception by Russian poets of Shelley, Ruskin, Pater, Frazer and Wilde, which gave new impetus to the Russian imagination at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries. Framing this account is a pioneering exploration of the intellectual background to these influences, and a discussion of Russian conceptions of national identity, literary influence and the origins of comparative literary history.

This first full-length account of the Russian verse tradition shows how certain formal features are associated with certain genres and specific themes. Keeping technical terms to a minimum and providing English translations of all quotations, Michael Wachtel offers close readings of poems by more than fifty poets from Pushkin to Brodsky, and demonstrates the practical interpretive value of paying attention to poetic form. Ultimately, his book is an inquiry into the nature of literary tradition in a country that has always taken much of its identity from its written legacy.

This is the first comprehensive study of the group of avant-garde Soviet writers who styled themselves OBERIU, "The Association for Real Art." Graham Roberts reexamines commonly-held assumptions about OBERIU, its identity as a group, its aesthetics, its relationship to the formalists and the Bakhtin circle, and its place within Russian and European literary traditions. Roberts concludes by showing how the self-conscious literature of OBERIU--its metafiction--occupies an important transitional space between modernism and postmodernism.

Khlebnikov is now recognized as a major Russian poet of the twentieth century, having for years been dismissed as an unintelligible verbal trickster. Cooke provides the first broad study in English of Khlebnikov's writings. The book is both informative and interpretative, and maps the contours of Khlebnikov's still largely uncharted poetic world. This exploration highlights the complex relationship between the poet and his public, examines Khlebnikov's preoccupations with the meaning of language and images of war and conflict, and cites the transformation of a poet-warrior into the...

This attractively-illustrated book offers a unique and fascinating investigation into the lives and careers of the British in eighteenth-century Russia and, more specifically, into the development of a vibrant British community in St. Petersburg during the city's first century of existence. Based on an extremely wide use of primary sources from Britain and Russia, the book concentrates on the British within various fields such as commerce, the navy, the medical profession, science and technology, and the arts, and as curious travelers.

This book explores the immense influence of the composer Richard Wagner on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian writers, musicians and artists. It contains a history of the production of Wagner's works in Russia and the Soviet Union (by directors including Meyerhold and Eisenstein), an account of Wagner's visit to Russia in 1863, and a detailed investigation of the impact of his music and ideas on the Russian Modernist movement. The last two chapters explore the fate of Wagner's works after the 1917 Revolution, when he was first hailed but then reviled, and finally rehabilitated during...

This is the first synthesizing study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of empire-building. It covers major writers including Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lermontov, but also introduces material from travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the utterances of tsarist officials and military commanders. Setting these writings and the responses of the Russian readership in historical and cultural context, Susan Layton examines ways that literature underwrote imperialism. But her study also reveals the tensions between the Russian state's ideology of a...

This collection of original essays by leading Western and Russian specialists gives an overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, between 1600 and the present, exploring the differences between the writing of women and men in Russia. It combines a study of the history and biography of previously neglected women writers with close readings of literary texts, demonstrating that although many Russian women writers have been unjustly disadvantaged and marginalized, their work contains much of interest for contemporary women readers.