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

After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and their families have received no significant compensation. This book's premise is that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices. More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains "the land of the unburied": the...

Scholars have long noted the deeply rooted veneration of the power of the word both the expressive and communicative capacities of language in Russian literature and culture. In her ambitious book "Silence and the Rest, " Sofya Khagi illuminates a consistent counternarrative, showing how, throughout its entire history, Russian poetry can be read as an argument for what she calls verbal skepticism. Although she deals with many poets from a two-century tradition, Khagi gives special emphasis to Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and Timur Kibirov, offering readings that add new layers of...

Bakhtin and his Others aims to develop an understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin s ideas through a contextual approach, particularly with a focus on Bakhtin studies from the 1990s onward. The volume offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality including his concepts of chronotope and literary polyphony by reconsidering his ideas in relation to the sources he employs, and taking into account later research on similar topics. The case studies show how Bakhtin's ideas, when seen in light of this approach, can be constructively employed in...

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying...

In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessa--as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu--shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Val-entin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a...

Just Assassins is an engrossing collection of fourteen original essays that illuminate terrorism as it has occurred in Russian culture past and present. The broad range of writers and scholars have contributed work that examines Russian literature, film, and theater; historical narrative; and even amateur memoir, songs, and poetry posted on the Internet. Along with editor Anthony Anemone's introduction, these essays chart the evolution of modern political terrorism in Russia, from the Decembrist uprising to the horrific school siege in Beslan in 2004.
As terrorism and the fear...

The Imperative of Reliability examines the development of nineteenth-century Russian prose and the remarkably swift emergence of the Russian novel. Victoria Somoff identifies an unprecedented situation in the production and perception of the utterance that came to define nascent novelistic fictionality both in European and Russian prose, where the utterance itself whether an oral story or a found manuscript became the object of representation within the compositional format of the frame narrative. This circumstance generated a narrative perspective from which both the events and...

Longlist finalist, 2015 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History

Julia Bekman Chadaga's ambitious study posits that glass--in its uses as a material and as captured in culture--is a key to understanding the evolution of Russian identity from the eighteenth century onward. From the contemporary perspective, it is easy to overlook how glass has profoundly transformed vision. Chadaga shows the far-reaching effects of this phenomenon.

Her book examines the similarities between glass and language, the ideological uses of glass, and...