Russian women's writing is now attracting enormous interest both in the West and in Russia itself. This is the first one-volume history of the subject to appear in any language in modern times. Written from a bold feminist perspective, the book combines a broad historical survey with close textual analysis. Sections on women's writing in the periods 1820-1880, 1881-1917, 1917-1954, and 1953-1992 are followed by essays on individual writers. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including rare literary journals and almanacs, Catriona Kelly's account shows familiar figures such as Akhmatova,...

Refining Russia is a pioneering study of the development of advice literature ("how-to" books such as etiquette manuals and brochures on hygiene) in Russia, and of its reception and wider cultural meaning. An absorbing and original exercise in "history of the book," it is also a major contribution to the understanding of Russia's relationship with the West, and of the cultural world inhabited by the Russian intelligentsia.

This collection offers a pioneering new account of the relationship between literature and other cultural forms in Late Imperial Russia and Revolutionary Russia. The contributors here recontextualize Russian literature, and rethink the relations between literature and other cultural forms. The book examines a number of, in Bourdieu's term, "cultural fields" in late Imperial Russia: science and objectivity, national and personal identity, and consumerism and commercial culture. Including contributions from leading specialists in Russian literature, cultural history, and cultural theory, this...

This is the first book to provide a synthesizing study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of empire-building. From Pushkin's ambivalent portrayal of an alpine Circassia to Tolstoy's condemnation of tsarist aggression against Muslim tribes in Hadji Murat, the literary analysis is firmly set in its historical context, and the responses of the Russian readership to receive extensive attention. As well as exploring literature as such, Susan Layton introduces material from travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the utterances of tsarist...

Catteau's highly acclaimed book on Dostoyevsky has already won three French literary awards, and now appears in English for the first time. This is an original and detailed attempted to reexamine Dostoyevsky the artist, tracing the creative process from its notebook beginnings to its novelistics expression, and at the same time analyzing the structures of time and space, the role of color, and other important textual features. For this edition, the author has revised his book and updated the bibliography giving, where possible, references to the Soviet Academy of Sciences' edition of...

This book examines the influence of Christianity on the thought and work of the great Russian theorist Mikhael Bakhtin, paying particular attention to the motifs of God the Creator, the Fall, the Incarnation and Christian love. This is the first full-length work to approach Bakhtin from a religious perspective, and introduces the reader to a vitally important but hitherto ignored aspect of his work. In this context Ruth Coates presents readings of Bakhtin very different from those of Marxist and Structuralist critics.

This book interprets the baffling complex of meanings attached by Russian culture to the concept of everyday life, or byt, and assesses its impact on Russian modernist narrative. Drawing on modern literary theory and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two aesthetic systems, one predominant in Western Catholic and Protestant cultures, the other reflected in Orthodox iconic traditions. He offers provocative, yet careful, readings of key narrative texts from the period.

This is the first full-length study of the huge popularity and cultural impact of fortune telling in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present. It examines the ways in which popular fortune telling books found acceptance among urban and literate Russians, the role of women in fortune telling, and the function of fortune telling in their culture. It goes on to consider the relationship between urban fortune telling and traditional oral culture, and discusses why fortune telling continues as a powerful force in modern Russian society.

This is the first book-length study of Andrei Bitov, one of contemporary Russia's most original writers. It plots his evolution from the post-Stalin years to his mature masterpieces of the glasnost era and assesses his place in the Russian and international literary tradition. Ellen Chances explores his themes, from the psychological effects of Stalin on Soviet society to universal questions such as the human being's relationship with nature, history and culture, and describes how his writings go beyond modernist and postmodernist fragmentation in search of the wholeness of life.

N.M. Karamzin (1766-1826) was the foremost Russian representative of the late eighteenth-century Sentimentalist movement. In this study, Gitta Hammarberg makes use of recent advances in literary theory (especially those based on the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov) in order to develop a new theory of Sentimentalist literature, which she applies to Karamzin's prose fiction. Professor Hammarberg situates Sentimentalism in its historical context, as a reflection of contemporary shifts in world view, a reaction against the Neo-Classicist view of literature, and a vehicle for legitimizing prose...