Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Russian & Former Soviet Union

In ""Writing a Usable Past," " Brintlinger considers the interactions of post-Revolutionary Russian and emigre culture with the genre of biography in its various permutations, arguing that in the years after the Revolution, Russian writers looked to the great literary figures of the past to help them construct a post-Revolutionary present. In detailed looks at the biographical writing of Yuri Tynianov, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Mikhail Bulgakov, Brintlinger follows each author's successful biography/ies and their failed attempts at biographies of Alexander Pushkin on the centennial...

A wildly prolific director, actor, and writer, Vasilii Shukshin (1929-74) reached more Soviets in more media than perhaps any other artist in the post-Stalinist USSR. This first English-language study of Shukshin and his work is thus a portrait of the culture of Soviet Russia after Stalin. John Givens begins with Shukshin's position between cultural realms and social strata: his abandoned peasant heritage in Siberia as the son of a purged kulak on the one hand and his life as a successful artist in Moscow on the other. Givens shows how this clash of cultures and identities was both a...

Nikolai Gogol's claim to the title of national literary classic is incontestable. Since his lifetime, every generation of Russian writers and readers has had to come to terms somehow with his ingeniously suggestive and comically virtuosic art. An exemplar for popular audiences no less than for the intelligentsia, Gogol was pressed into service under the tsarist and Soviet regimes for causes both aesthetic and political, official and unofficial. In Gogol's Afterlife, Stephen...

The life of a human community rests on common experience. Yet in modem life there is an experience common to all that threatens the very basis of community -- the experience of exile. No one in the modem world has been spared the encounter with homelessness. Refugees and fugitives, the disillusioned and disenfranchised grow in number every day. Why does it happen? What does it mean? And how are we implicated?

David Patterson responds to these and related questions by examining exile, a primary motif in Russian thought over the last century and a half. By "exile" he means not only a...

The weather in Moscow is good, there's no cholera, there's also no lesbian love...Brrr Remembering those persons of whom you write me makes me nauseous as if I'd eaten a rotten sardine. Moscow doesn't have them--and that's marvellous.-
--Anton Chekhov, writing to his publisher in 1895

Chekhov's barbed comment suggests the climate in which Sophia Parnok was writing, and is an added testament to to the strength and confidence with which she pursued both her personal and artistic life. Author of five volumes of poetry, and lover of Marina Tsvetaeva, Sophia Parnok was the...

The weather in Moscow is good, there's no cholera, there's also no lesbian love...Brrr Remembering those persons of whom you write me makes me nauseous as if I'd eaten a rotten sardine. Moscow doesn't have them--and that's marvellous.-
--Anton Chekhov, writing to his publisher in 1895

Chekhov's barbed comment suggests the climate in which Sophia Parnok was writing, and is an added testament to to the strength and confidence with which she pursued both her personal and artistic life. Author of five volumes of poetry, and lover of Marina Tsvetaeva, Sophia Parnok was the...