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

This book contains the Russian text of Petrov and Ilf's Selected Stories, edited with an English language introduction and notes

This book contains the Russian text of Dostoevsky's Dream of a Ridiculous Man, with an English language introduction and notes on the text.

This is a title in the Bristol Classical Press Russian Texts series, in Russian with English notes, vocabulary and introduction. The influence of Andrey Platonov (1899-1951), a gifted writer of the Soviet era, has pervaded Soviet and Russian literature since the 1950s. "The River Potudan" (1937), should introduce the student of Russian to the complex thought and ideas that writers like Platonov, despite the severity of the times, were able, and brave enough, to convey. This story concerns a soldier returning from war, who with the support of a community of friends and family, builds a new...

Both critics and admirers of Tolstoy's great novel were shocked by the savage iconoclasm of his What is Art? when it appeared in 1898. How was it that this great artist could condemn the works of Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven and even his own Anna Karenina as 'false art'? Today's reader still has to grapple with that paradox. The essay still has power to challenge and provoke, for it was written by a giant who took art seriously while western civilisation toyed with it as a mere pastime. For Tolstoy, art was as natural and as necessary for humankind as speech.

In his...

This book contains the Russian text of Turgenev's First Love, with an English language introduction and notes.

Anton Chekhov has long been regarded as the master of the Russian short story and one of the leading exponents of the genre in world literature. This volume comprises the classic selection edited by Birkett and Struve, in Russian, here furnished with a new bibliography, and complements the stories and plays by Chekhov already available in the BCP Russian Texts series. The twelve stories, which date from 1883 to 1896, range from miniatures of comic levity such as Tolsttyi i tonkii to stories of sophisticated maturity such as Dom s mezoninom. The stories included are as follows...

This is a title in the Bristol Classical Press Russian Texts series, in Russian with English notes, vocabulary and introduction. Vasilii Shukshin is a writer in the tradition of "village prose," a literary movement which has emerged from 20th-century Russian literature. In "Snowball Berry Red" (1973) he considers the plight of the rootless individual who is unable to return to his rural background and settle down in a changing community. Although village prose writing contains colourful, local dialogue which is often difficult for all but the most fluent readers of Russian, Shukshin...

This monograph aims to offer an in-depth critical analysis of Lermontov's novel, in the light of the latest criticism on the work. A review of the critical reception of the novel from publication up to the present day is offered in the introduction, and there is a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources. This is followed with analysis of the novels' five consistent stories, as well as its introductory apparatus, to produce new critical insights into the text. Particular stress is laid on the role of ethnicity in the novel, taking into account its role in the development of the...

This is a title in the Bristol Classical Press Russian Texts series, in Russian with English notes, vocabulary and introduction. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) is well-known for his novel, "The Master and Margarita," published posthumously in the 1970s. In his own life he was best known as a playwright, with plays running at several of the leading theatres in Moscow during the 1920s and 1930s. "Flight" takes as its subject the defeated Whites as they flee the Reds and emigrate to Constantinople and Paris. The play was too politically controversial to be staged in Bulgakov's lifetime. Couched...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an unknown author until the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in 1962, the book that was to win him the Nobel Prize in 1970. It is an account of a barely literate Russian peasant's surviving a single day in one of Stalin's labour camps. It depicted the intricacies and resilience of the human spirit in a style comparable with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. This study gauges the political and literary impact that the book has made in Russia and abroad, and examines its more universal, intrinsic qualities.

Originally published in 1835, this is one of two works by Gogol dealing with the "little man" (the other is "The Overcoat"). Of over 150 examples of this genre, these two stories are often considered the most complex, both linguistically and psychologically. Poprischin is not at the bottom of the social ladder; he is a middle-aged, grade nine civil servant, with at least ten minions under him. Nevertheless he is painfully aware of the social gap between himself and his Director and, even more so, between himself and Sophie, the Director's daughter. Poprischin's frustrated love for Sophie...

Eight of Russia's most popular and significant novels are presented in this important new guide for students. Works include:

- "We" by Evgenii Zamiatin

- "Red Cavalry" by Isaak Babel

- "Envy" by Iurii Olesha

- "How the Steel Was Tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovskii

- "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov

- "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak

- "Cancer Ward" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

- "Pushkin House" by Andrei Bitov

In each chapter, David Gillespie examines one novel in detail and explores the career of the author and the critical...

This superb introduction to the work of the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1886-1966) begins with an account of her life in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and Stalinist Russia, and focuses principally on her poetry. Incorporating all recent scholarship, the author traces the way in which Akhmatova's work reflects the tumultuous times in which she lived, and her emergence as the spokeswoman of her generation, to provide a long overdue account of her entire career.

-Roll over Derrida: Literature and Revolution is back in print. Nothing in the postmodern canon comes close to the intellectual grandeur of Trotsky's vision of art and literature in an age of revolution, or his extraordinary meditations on the popular ownership of culture.---Mike Davis

-Re-reading Trotsky on literature 40 years later is a delight.---Tariq Ali

Leon Trotsky penned this engaging book to elucidate the complex way in which art informs-- and can alter--our understanding of the world. Features new reader-friendly explanatory notes.

Leon Trotsky was...