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

From the country that has added to our vocabulary such colorful terms as "purges," "pogroms," and "gulag," this collection investigates the conspicuous marks of violence in Russian history and culture.
Russians and non-Russians alike have long debated the reasons for this endemic violence. Some have cited Russia's huge size, unforgiving climate, and exposed geographical position as formative in its national character, making invasion easy and order difficult. Others have fixed the blame on cultural and religious traditions that spurred internecine violence or on despotic rulers or...

Balanced precariously between fact and fiction, the historical novel is often viewed with suspicion. Some have attacked it as a mongrel form, a bastard son born of history s flagrant adultery with imagination. Yet it includes some of the most celebrated achievements of Russian literature, with Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and scores of other writers contributing to this tradition.
Dan Ungurianu s "Plotting History" traces the development of the Russian historical novel from its inception in the romantic era to the emergence of Modernism on the eve of the Revolution....

This magisterial work, written by one of the world's foremost Slavic scholars, presents a survey of Russian literature from its beginning in the eleventh century to modern times. Victor Terras argues eloquently that Russian literature has reflected, defined, and shaped the nation's beliefs and goals, and he sets his survey against a background of social and political developments and religious and philosophic thought.

Terras traces a rich literary heritage that encompasses Russian folklore of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, medieval literature that in style...

Among nineteenth-century novelists, there is probably none who speaks so directly to the modern reader as Fedor Dostoevski. His visions of alienation and terror have not lost their power to shake our complacency even in this present age, hardened as it is to violence and social decay. In this stimulating collection of essays, a distinguished group of specialists in comparative literature and the social sciences explores the themes and problems with which Dostoevski struggled as both a writer and as a man and assesses their continuing relevance to the modern world. Encompassing a wide range...

Readers have long recognized that Western literature reflects the social, political, and cultural structures that favored colonial masters and their point of view. In both popular and scholarly usage, colonies are territories whose conquest requires travel overseas. Because Russia's contiguous colonies have generally been viewed as gradual and legitimate enlargements of Russian territory and ethnicity, Russian literature has escaped the scrutiny given to Western literary works. This volume argues that Russia's acts of territorial expansion are a form of colonization, and it employs...

A Window on Russia is a collection of Wilson's papers on Russian writers and the Russian language, writtern between 1943 and 1971.

"In A Window on Russia, which Wilson modestly calls 'a handful of disconnected pieces, written at various times when I happened to be interested in the various authors, ' we encounter that rare pleasure of entering a living world where the dead hand of academia never casts its shadow." - Kirkus Reviews

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most influential theorists of philosophy as well as literary studies. His work on dialogue and discourse has changed the way in which we read texts - both literary and cultural - and his practice of philosophy in literary refraction and philological exploration has made him a pioneering figure in the twentieth-century convergence of the two disciplines.

In this book, Graham Pechey offers a commentary on Bakhtin's texts in all their complex and allusive 'textuality', keeping a sense throughout of the historical setting in which they were written and of...