Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Eastern European (see also Russian & Former Soviet Union)

The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world. Each essay analyses an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three prominent Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. This volume is particularly valuable in that its main focus is placed on the perception of Chekhov's art by those who existed on the border between literary criticism and philosophy. This is complemented by a literary critique of their accounts, and therefore remains faithful to Chekhov's...

Offering an incisive new study of literature and nationalism, Cooper examines fundamental developments in Russian and Czech literature and criticism from 1800 to 1830, a period that has largely been neglected in the English-language scholarship. While other books have focused on the question of why developing nations look to literature as a source of national identity, Cooper asks why ideas of nationality were necessary for critics and writers seeking to evolve new genres and forms and modernize literary values. Cooper s ambitious work produces a clear picture of the paradigm shift in...

In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Boena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects-pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils-tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, Wadysaw Szlengel, Zofia Nakowska, Czesaw Miosz, Jerzy...

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten--from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city's foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde--Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and...

For Humanity's Sake is the first study in English to trace the genealogy of the classic Russian novel, from Pushkin to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky. Lina Steiner demonstrates how these writers' shared concern for individual and national education played a major role in forging a Russian cultural identity.

For Humanity's Sake highlights the role of the critic Apollon Grigor'ev, who was first to formulate the difference between West European and Russian conceptions of national education or Bildung -- which he attributed to Russia's special sociopolitical conditions,...