Literary companions, book reviews and guides Books

Book SynopsisThis guide for literature enthusiasts and travelers alike reveals what Francophiles have long known: France is so much more than the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées. Including contributions from such celebrated French writers as Colette, Gabriel Chevallier, and Emmanuelle Laborit, this lively anthology takes readers through France in literary style. In Paris, walk down twisty Rue Ferrière, take a spin on a Franco-Arab carousel, and eavesdrop on a Jewish funeral party. In the suburbs, meet a pint-sized book thief and a gritty ghetto gang. Then visit Provence, Brittany, Normandy, and Alsace-Lorraine, and even witness the Tour de France. Organized by region, these charming stories are often funny, occasionally surreal, and always compelling.

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Book SynopsisYi Kwang-su (1892–1950) was one of the pioneers of modern Korean literature. When the serialization of Mujong (The Heartless) began in 1917, it was an immediate sensation, and it occupies a prominent place in the Korean literary canon. The Heartless is the story of a love triangle among three youths during the Japanese occupation. Yi HyÅng-sik is a young man in his mid-twenties who is teaching English at a middle school in Seoul. Brilliant but also shy and indecisive, he is torn between two women. Kim SÅn-hyÅng is from a wealthy Christian family; she has just graduated from a modern, Western-style school and is planning on continuing her studies in the United States. Pak YÅng-ch'ae is a musically gifted young woman who was raised in a traditional Confucian manner; due to family misfortune, she has become a kisaeng but remains devoted to HyÅng-sik whom she knew as a child. The Heartless goes beyond the level of romantic melodrama and uses these characters to depict Korea's struggles with modern culture and national identity. A long critical introduction discusses Yi Kwang-su's life and work from his birth in 1892 to the publication of his first novel The Heartless in 1917. It contains in-depth analyses of the novel, Yi Kwang-su's literary theory, and early short stories.Trade ReviewThose of us interested in modern Korean literature are indebted to Ann Sung-Hi Lee for making this full text of Mujong available in English in a thoroughly researched and readable translation. -- Kichung Kim * Korean Studies Review *

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Book SynopsisOn ten strolls through some of the most interesting areas of London, Rudiger Gorner explores the literary landscape of the capital. He meets Shakespeare, Heine and Hogarth south of the river, finds Virginia Woolf and Lady Ottoline Morell in Bloomsbury, discovers Blake and Trollope in Westminster, happens on the Carlyles in Chelsea, comes across John Keats in beautiful Hampstead and searches for Bacon and Hanif Kureishi in the London suburbs. Following this literary rambler means discovering familiar places and their history anew, by seeing them through the eyes of those who walked the streets before him.Trade Review'If you like London - or love good writing - you'll want to curl up with this book and walk the streets with the great writers who have been there before' TRIBUNE 'Captures a flavour of the capital in all its myriad glory...a refreshingly novel perspective' GOOD BOOK GUIDE

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Book SynopsisIn 1960, two high school friends were assigned to read the Herman Melville novel Moby-Dick. Neither one of them read it. Four decades later, plagued by feelings of guilt at never having read The Great American Novel, the two friends grab for belated gusto. Over the six months of their reading odyssey, the authors wrote a series of letters and e-mails chronicling their experience and encouraging each other's progress. This body of correspondence is now a book. Actually, the reading of Moby-Dick is just a platform. And while it is the primary substance of the book, the writers do not worry themselves much about staying within subject matter boundaries. The letters also touch on: their fifty-year friendship, growing old, Alex Rodriguez, the War in Iraq, Bob Dylan, speculation on the chances of getting sick in Mexico, the true story of how Hemingway got to Sweden, the cause of nightmares, Bebe Rebozo, Vladimir Nabokov, redemption and death. TWO GUYS READ MOBY-DICK will have you laughing from start to finish, and pondering life's many mysteries, of course!

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Book SynopsisThis research monograph argues that Scott Fitzgerald consciously used a variety of Joycean devices in The Great Gatsby and these devices were the result of close readings of Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses. The monograph breaks new ground in Fitzgerald scholarship and has implications for Joyceans as well. This study sets out to prove that Fitzgerald modeled numerous elements of GATSBY on elements found in Joyce’s ULYSSES. FSF imitated Joyce’s use of the first letter in each of the parts of ULYSSES. There Joyce alluded to two matters (1)the first names of his characters and (2) the logical steps of a syllogism. Fitzgerald enriched this device. He developed three parts in his novel (3-3-3) and used the first and last letters of each of his 9 chapters for two purposes : to repay in a bold and playful way his debt to Joyce and to honor Ernest Renan, famed for his LIFE OF JESUS,and a source of burlesque techniques employed in Gatsby. This is just one example of a number of research issues raised by Tanner, a number new to Fitzgerald scholarship.Other chapters deal with FSF imitation of Joyce’s “Araby” in Fitzgerald’s story “Absolution”(a precursor to Gatsby), sources for Christian allusions and direct allusions to ULYSSES, the shadowing and doubling of characters ,patterns of imagery and numeracy in topics and theme. The work contains two appendices including a significant comparison of Trimalchio and THE GREAT GATSBY.

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Book SynopsisDuring and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces --nationalism and Marxism--clashed and changed the future of African American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fiction, poetry, and prose of the day. Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box challenges that notion. It boldly proposes that such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse. Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression era, Anthony Dawahare argues that the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements between the world wars did guide legitimate political desires of black writers for a world without racism. But the nationalist channels of political and cultural resistance did not address the capitalist foundation of modern racial discrimination. During the period known as the ""Red Decade"" (1929-1941), black writers developed some of the sharpest critiques of the capitalist world and thus anticipated contemporary scholarship on the intellectual and political hazards of nationalism for the working class. As it examines the progression of the Great Depression, the book focuses on the shift of black writers to the Communist Left, including analyses of the Communists' position on the ""Negro Question,"" the radical poetry of Langston Hughes, and the writings of Richard Wright.

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Book SynopsisFor several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the “mythopoetic thinking” that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of “erasure” and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their art is increasingly moot. The lichnost’ (personhood, psychic totality) of the given writer is all-important, argues Bethea, as it is that which combines the specifically biographical and the capaciously mythical in verbal units that speak simultaneously to different planes of being. Pushkin’s Evgeny can be one incarnation of the poet himself and an Everyman rising up to challenge Peter’s new world order; Brodsky can be, all at once, Dante and Mandelstam and himself, the exile paying an Orphic visit to Florence (and, by ghostly association, Leningrad).This sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers’ lives, is Bethea’s primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea’s most memorable previously published essays along with new studies prepared for this occasion.Trade ReviewBethea (Slavic languages and literatures, U. of Wisconsin-Madison and Russian studies, Oxford U.) explores how the poetic impulse creates and is created by story, looking at Russian literature primarily as transmission and modification of large cultural patterns, though also recognizing the individuality of the authors. A central section on Pushkin as poet and thinker is preceded by a section on general themes and followed by one surveying how other Russian authors viewed their own work and that of others. Specific topics include the apocalyptic plot in Russian literature, how to read Pushkin's dialogue with Shakespeare in The Stone Guest, and Nabokov's style, and Joseph Brodsky's "To My Daughter." The ultra-contemporary typeface is for readers with a short attention span. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)|“Few American Slavists have been as prolific as David M. Bethea; hence this ample collection represents only a small sampling of his work. Nonetheless, it gives a good sense of his scholarly preoccupations over the past three decades. The book is wide-ranging in both its theoretical concerns and its choice of primary texts. . . . Bethea’s approach opens up obscure passages in unprecedented ways, often with admirable clarity.” –Michael Wachtel, Princeton University, in the Slavic ReviewTable of ContentsPreface: David Bethea. Introduction: Caryl Emerson. Part One: Russian Literature: Background, Foreground, Creative Cognition. 1. The Mythopoetic "Vectors" of Russian Literature. 2. Mythopoesis Writ Large: The Apocalyptic Plot in Russian Literature. 3. Mythopoesis and Biography: Pushkin, Jakobson, and the Secret Life of Statues. 4. The Evolution of Evolution: Genes, Memes, Intelligent Design and Nabokov. 5. Relativity and Reality: Dante, Florensky, Lotman, and Metaphorical Time-Travel. 6. Whose Mind is this Anyway? Influence, Intertextuality, and the Legitimate Boundaries of Scholarship. Part 2: Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker. 7. Of Pushkin and Pushkinists. 8. Biography (with Sergei Davydov). 9. Pushkin's Mythopoetic Consciousness: Apuleius, Psyche and Cupid, and the Theme of Metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin. 10. "A Higher Audacity": How to Read Pushkin's Dialogue with Shakespeare in The Stone Guest. 11. Stabat Pater: Revisiting the "Monumental" in Peter, Petersburg, and Pushkin. 12. Slavic Gift Giving, the Poet in History, and Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter. 13. Pushkin's The History of Pugachev: Where Fact Meets the Zero-Degree of Fiction. Part 3: Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others. 14. Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich's Memory Speaks. 15. Nabokov's Style. 16. Sologub, Nabokov, and the Limits of Decadent Aesthetics. 17. Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky's "Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot". 18. Joseph Brodsky and the American Seashore Poem: Lowell, Mandelstam, and Cape Cod. 19. Joseph Brodsky's "To My Dauther" (A Reading). 20. Brodsky, Frost and the Pygmalion Myth. Index.

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Book SynopsisThe Twentieth Century Russian Short Story: A Critical Companion is a collection of the most informative critical articles on some of the best twentieth-century Russian short stories from Chekhov and Bunin to Tolstaya and Pelevin. While each article focuses on a particular short story, collectively they elucidate the developments in each author’s oeuvre and in the subjects, structure, and themes of the twentieth-century Russian short story. American, European and Russian scholars discuss the recurrent themes of language’s power and limits, of childhood and old age, of art and sexuality, and of cultural, individual and artistic memory. The book opens with a discussion of the short story genre and its socio-cultural function. This book will be of value to all scholars of Russian literature, the short story, and genre theory.Trade ReviewParts (Russian, McGill University) brings together an international group of scholars for an analysis of the Russian short story in the twentieth century. She considers first if there is something particular about the character Russian short story but leaves the reader to decide. The essays discuss writers well known in the West, such as Chekhov, Nabokov and Pasternak along with those not yet recognized outside Russia: Andrei Platonov, Yury Olesha, Isaak Babel, Abram Tertz, Vasili Shukshin, Varlan Shamalov, Tatiana Tolstaia, Lyudmila Petrushevskaia, Victor Erofeev, Andrei Bitov and Viktor Pelevin. One chapter is a translation of a story by Petrushevskaia. Some of the essays place the stories within Communist or pre-revolutionary society. Others are seen as a reflection of universal emotions. The themes of memory, childhood and loss appear often in the stories chosen for commentary. The authors speculate on whether there is a difference in the way these are treated by the Russian writers. This is an interesting study of both Russian writers and the form of the short story itself. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)|“…The content of this collection is timely and appropriate ten years intot he twenty-first century as a point of entry for evaluation and reflection on exclusively twentieth-century literary phenomena in Russia. The articles within would complement the texts typically included in a graduate-level or advanced undergraduate-level course in twentieth century literature and culture. Similarly, for the scholar of twentieth-century literature, this is a nice collection for personal reference.” —Rachel Stauffer, University of Virginia, in Slavic and East European Journal|“The strongest essays are those on Isaak Babel’ (by the late Robert Maguire), Varlam Shalamov (Leona Toker), and Vasilii Shukshin (Diane Nemec Ignashev). . . . [T]his volume is a welcome reminder of the varied scholarship inspired by the literature of the last century. Recommended.” —B. M. Sutcliffe, Miami University, in CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2010Table of ContentsContributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction: The Short Story as the Genre of Cultural Transition. LYUDMILA PARTS. Chekhov’s “The Darling”: Femininity Scorned and Desired. SVETLANA EVDOKIMOVA. Bunin’s “Gentle Breath.” LEV VYGOTSKY. Ekphrasis in Isaak Babel (“Pan Apolek,”“My First Goose”). ROBERT MAGUIRE. Zoshchenko’s “Electrician,” or the Complex Theatrical Mechanism. ALEKSANDER ZHOLKOVSKY.Yury Olesha’s Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of “Liompa.” ANDREW BARRATT. Nabokov’s Art of Memory: Recollected Emotion in “Spring in Fialta” (1936-1947). JOHN BURT FOSTER, JR. Child Perspective: Tradition and Experiment. An Analysis of “The Childhood of Lovers” by Boris Pasternak. FIONA BJORLING. Andrei Platonov and the Inadmissibility of Desire (“The River Potudan”). ERIC NAIMAN. “This Could Have Been Foreseen”: Kharms’s “The Old Woman” (Starukha) Revisited. A Collective Analysis. ROBIN MILNER-GULLAND. Testimony as Art: Varlam Shalamov’s “Condensed Milk.” LEONA TOKER. The Writer as Criminal: Abram Tertz’s “Pkhents.” CATHARINE THEIMER NEPOMNYASHCHY. Vasilii Shukshin’s “Cut Down to Size” (Srezal) and the Question of Transition. DIANE IGNASHEVNEMEC. Carnivalization of the Short Story Genre and the Künstlernovelle: Tatiana Tolstaia’s “The Poet and the Muse.”, ERICA GREBER. Down the Intertextual Lane: Petrushevskaia, Chekhov, Tolstoy (“The Lady With the Dogs”)., LYUDMILA PARTS. “The Lady with the Dogs,” by Lyudmila Petrushevskaia. Translated by Krystyna Anna Steiger. Russian Postmodernist Fiction and Mythologies of History: Viacheslav Pietsukh’s “The Central-Ermolaevo War” and Viktor Erofeev’s “Parakeet.” MARK LIPOVETSKY. Psychosis and Photography: Andrei Bitov’s “Pushkin’s Photograph.” SVEN SPIEKER. The “Traditional Postmodernism” of Viktor Pelevin’s Short Story “Nika.” OLGA BOGDANOVA.

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Book SynopsisThe impetus for Charms of the Cynical Reason is the phenomenal and little-explored popularity of various tricksters flourishing in official and unofficial Soviet culture, as well as in the post-soviet era. Mark Lipovetsky interprets this puzzling phenomenon through analysis of the most remarkable and fascinating literary and cinematic images of soviet and post-soviet tricksters, including such “cultural idioms” as Ostap Bender, Buratino, Vasilii Tyorkin, Shtirlitz, and others. The steadily increasing charisma of Soviet tricksters from the 1920s to the 2000s is indicative of at least two fundamental features of both the soviet and post-soviet societies. First, tricksters reflect the constant presence of irresolvable contradictions and yawning gaps within the soviet (as well as post-soviet) social universe. Secondly, these characters epitomize the realm of cynical culture thus far unrecognized in Russian studies. Soviet tricksters present survival in a cynical, contradictory and inadequate world, not as a necessity, but as a field for creativity, play, and freedom. Through an analysis of the representation of tricksters in soviet and post-soviet culture, Lipovetsky attempts to draw a virtual map of the soviet and post-soviet cynical reason: to identify its symbols, discourses, contradictions, and by these means its historical development from the 1920s to the 2000s.Trade Review“Mark Lipovetsky’s work makes a critical intervention in the study of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture. Recent scholarship has made great strides in overcoming the binary categories that once characterized accounts of Soviet society—in most different ways—in both the USSR and the West: official vs. unofficial, conformist vs. dissident, socialist bloc vs. the capitalist West, etc. As works in history, anthropology and sociology have begun to show, life in the Soviet Union was painted in shades of grey, admitting a huge range of economic behaviors, social interactions, and political values located “between and betwixt.” With this book, in one brilliant stroke, Lipovetsky has brought home these insights with regard to the study of Soviet literature and culture. The figure of the trickster, which Lipovetsky finds across an enormous range of important, canonical and beloved works, was at once the embodiment of socialist values and a subversive, concretizing the special forms of identity and social skills required for survival in the Soviet Union. This study shows us in a new manner what was distinctive about Soviet social and cultural history and in what ways it should be seen as a variety of the common story of modernity. Further, it explores how the cultural life of present-day Russia has inherited these structures and patterns. Lipovetsky’s erudition is vast, his critical acumen is impressive, and his writing is superbly nuanced and exciting. In short, this is a remarkable addition to scholarship.” —Kevin Platt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of Pennsylvania, and author of History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution|“By focusing on the figure of the trickster, Mark Lipovetsky develops a new language for talking about subjectivity and ideology in Soviet and post-Soviet literature. The trickster shows just how inadequate talk of accommodation and resistance is when approaching the discourse of power in modern Russia. It turns out that the famously dualistic Russian culture has plenty of ways to go beyond “either/or,” and the trickster knows them all. Fortunately for us, Lipovetsky knows them as well.”—Eliot Bornstein, Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at NYU, and the author of Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 and Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture|“Mark Lipovetsky has produced a welcome addition to the growing area of scholarship examining performative discourses in Soviet and post-Soviet culture….In this pioneering work Lipovestky fuses contemporary postmodern theory with a subtle and accessible discussion of literary and cinematic texts in which the trickster plays the central role….This highly original study will be useful, not only for the literary, film, and cultural historians of Soviet and post-Soviet societies, but also for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.”—Alexander Porhkorov College of William and Mary|“This rich study offers an alternative approach to traditional representations of Soviet/post-Soviet culture on a number of levels—artistic, literary, social, philosophical, psychological, and even economic—through a close investigation of the trickster myth and its transformations through a century of ‘cynical reason.’ Lipovetsky provides illuminating, thorough background on the trickster in world cultures and concentrates on the peculiar Russian manifestations of the archetype. He clearly and authoritatively outlines basic traits of the trickster, defines ‘cynical reason,’ and meticulously reads work in a variety of genres. . . . Lipovetsky’s convincing arguments support his general thesis as well as his individual analyses. Footnotes (rather than endnotes) and a good bibliography enhance the work and point to the depth and breadth of Lipovetsky’s knowledge. Highly recommended.” —C. A. Rydel, Grand Valley State University, in CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, November 2011|“[A] thorough and original study. . .Throughout these analytical chapters, Lipovetsky. . . constructs an original new history of the creative intelligentsia in Soviet Russia, with whose recurrent identity crises he draws detailed links to the distinctive characteristics of the trickster.” —Seth Graham (UCL SSEES) in the Slavonic & East European Review Vol. 92, No. 2, April 2014

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Book SynopsisEarly Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts brings together twenty essays by Marcus C. Levitt, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century Russian literature. The essays address a spectrum of works and issues that shaped the development of modern Russian literature, from authorship and philosophy to gender and religion in Russian Enlightenment culture. The first part of the collection explores the career and works of Alexander Sumarokov, who played a formative role in literary life of his day. In the essays of the second part Levitt argues that the Enlightenment’s privileging of vision played an especially important role in eighteenth-century Russian self-image, and that its “occularcentrism” was profoundly shaped by Orthodox religious views. Early Modern Russian Letters offers a series of original and provocative explorations of a vital but little studied period.Trade ReviewProfessor Marcus Levitt, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century Russian literature, crowns years spent studying poet and playwright Alexander Sumarokov with a new collection of articles, some now made available in English for the first time. Containing a series of engaging essays on various aspects of Sumarokov’s oeuvre together with a variety of other studies concerning Russian culture, literature, history and philosophy, this volume will serve as an indispensable guide to all those studying eighteenth-century Russia for many years to come.-- Mark Altshuller, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages & Literatures, The University of Pittsburgh|The volume of articles by Marcus Levitt, a well-known expert of early modern Russian literature, embodies his pioneering work in this field. Levitt closes a glaring gap in the history of eighteenth-century Russian literature by providing a wealth of material and ideas about playwright and poet Alexander Sumarkov. Levitt goes on to offer an innovative approach to some of the most important questions of Russian eighteenth-century literature and culture. It is a pleasure to see the works by an admired colleague so handsomely presented in this thoroughly put together collection.-- Irina Reyfman, Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Columbia University|"In these essays, which include 18 previously published but here expanded and updated, Levitt (USC) brings into focus the letters, expository writings, and plays of Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov and his slanderous polemicist Vasily Trediakovsky. Supported by an immense body of quotations and passages, all well translated from the Russian originals, the essays offer Levitt's novel ideas on traditional and progressive trends in mid- to late-18th-century Russian culture. Marked by the author's sometimes - sarcastic commentaries on the literary epoch and its concerns, the book reflects Levitt's meticulous scholarship. The essays provide a wealth of information on topics, texts, and contexts -- e.g., Mikhail Lomonosov's odes, Czarina Catherine the Great's writings, Princess Dashkova's memoirs, Sumarokov's view on Russian orthography, Aleksandr Radishchev's dialectic observations in A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Fascinating arguments on the sources of Sumarokov's transposition of Shakespeare's Hamlet shed new light on the intellectual tenets of Russian classicism as Levitt ponders the possibility of Sumarokov's Lockean sensualism and the 18th-century Russian reception of Locke's writings. A valuable resource for students of Russian and comparative literature of this epoch. Summing up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- D. Hutchins, Buena Vista University, CHOICE, June 2010|''In this essay collection, Levitt (Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California) addresses works and issues that shaped the development of modern Russian literature, ranging from authorship and philosophy to gender and religion in Russian Enlightenment culture. Essays in the first part of the book explore the career and works of Alexander Sumarokov, who played a formative role in establishing 18th century Russian literature. In the second part, the author argues that the Enlightenment's privileging of vision as the principal means of understanding the world played an especially important role in the development of early modern Russian culture, and that eighteenth-century Russian "occularcentrism" was profoundly shaped by Orthodox religious views.''(Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)|"This volume will become indispensable to scholars specializing in eighteenth-century Russia. Further afield, specialists in the European Enlightenment will discover a wealth of scholarship about the Russian side of that story, much of it available for the first time in English. Levitt's collection weaves a rich tale about eighteenth-century Russia's linguistic development, the rise of its literary institution, and the complex interplay of Orthodoxy, westernizing secularization, and the heretofore overlooked dominance of the visual. Levitt writes lucidly and without jargon, making his ideas accessible and engaging for specialists and newcomers alike." -- Amanda Ewington, Davidson College, published in The Russian ReviewTable of ContentsForeword. Part One: SUMAROKOV AND THE LITERARY PROCESS OF HIS TIME. Preface. 1. Sumarokov: Life and Works. 2. Sumarokov’s Reading at the Academy of Sciences Library. 3. Censorship and Provocation: The Publishing History of Sumarokov’s “Two Epistles”. 4. Slander, Polemic, Criticism: Trediakovskii’s “Letter from a Friend to a Friend” of 1750 and the Problem of Creating Russian Literary Criticism. 5. Sumarokov’s Russianized “Hamlet”: Texts and Contexts. 6. Sumarokov’s Drama “The Hermit”: On the Generic and Intellectual Sources of Russian Classicism. 7. “The First Russian Ballet”: Sumarokov’s “Sanctuary of Virtue” (1759) Defining a New Dance. 8. Was Sumarokov a Lockean Sensualist? On Locke’s Reception in Eighteenth-Century Russia. 9. Barkoviana and Russian Classicism. 10. The Illegal Staging of Sumarokov’s Sinav and Truvor in 1770 and the Problem of Authorial Status in Eighteenth-Century Russia. 11. Sumarokov and the Unified Poetry Book: His Triumphal Odes and Love Elegies Through the Prism of Tradition. 12. The Barbarians among Us, or Sumarokov’s Views on Orthography. Early Modern Russian Letters: Part Two: VISUALITY AND ORTHODOXY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN CULTURE. Preface.13. The Rapprochement between “Secular” and “Religious” in Mid to Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture. 14. The “Obviousness” of the Truth in Eighteenth-Century Russian Thought. 15. The Theological Context of Lomonosov’s “Evening” and “Morning Meditations on God’s Majesty”. 16. The Ode as Revelation: On the Orthodox Theological Context of Lomonosov’s Odes. 17. An Antidote to Nervous Juice: Catherine the Great’s Debate with Chappe d’Auteroche over Russian Culture. 18. The Polemic with Rousseau over Gender and Sociability in E. S. Urusova’s Polion (1774). 19. Virtue Must Advertise: Self Presentation in Dashkova’s Memoirs. 20. The Dialectic of Vision in Radishchev’s Journey from Petersburg to Moscow. Sources

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Book SynopsisThe Twentieth Century Russian Short Story: A Critical Companion is a collection of the most informative critical articles on some of the best twentieth-century Russian short stories from Chekhov and Bunin to Tolstaya and Pelevin. While each article focuses on a particular short story, collectively they elucidate the developments in each author’s oeuvre and in the subjects, structure, and themes of the twentieth-century Russian short story. American, European and Russian scholars discuss the recurrent themes of language’s power and limits, of childhood and old age, of art and sexuality, and of cultural, individual and artistic memory. The book opens with a discussion of the short story genre and its socio-cultural function. This book will be of value to all scholars of Russian literature, the short story, and genre theory.Trade ReviewParts (Russian, McGill University) brings together an international group of scholars for an analysis of the Russian short story in the twentieth century. She considers first if there is something particular about the character Russian short story but leaves the reader to decide. The essays discuss writers well known in the West, such as Chekhov, Nabokov and Pasternak along with those not yet recognized outside Russia: Andrei Platonov, Yury Olesha, Isaak Babel, Abram Tertz, Vasili Shukshin, Varlan Shamalov, Tatiana Tolstaia, Lyudmila Petrushevskaia, Victor Erofeev, Andrei Bitov and Viktor Pelevin. One chapter is a translation of a story by Petrushevskaia. Some of the essays place the stories within Communist or pre-revolutionary society. Others are seen as a reflection of universal emotions. The themes of memory, childhood and loss appear often in the stories chosen for commentary. The authors speculate on whether there is a difference in the way these are treated by the Russian writers. This is an interesting study of both Russian writers and the form of the short story itself. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)|“…The content of this collection is timely and appropriate ten years intot he twenty-first century as a point of entry for evaluation and reflection on exclusively twentieth-century literary phenomena in Russia. The articles within would complement the texts typically included in a graduate-level or advanced undergraduate-level course in twentieth century literature and culture. Similarly, for the scholar of twentieth-century literature, this is a nice collection for personal reference.” —Rachel Stauffer, University of Virginia, in Slavic and East European Journal|“The strongest essays are those on Isaak Babel’ (by the late Robert Maguire), Varlam Shalamov (Leona Toker), and Vasilii Shukshin (Diane Nemec Ignashev). . . . [T]his volume is a welcome reminder of the varied scholarship inspired by the literature of the last century. Recommended.” —B. M. Sutcliffe, Miami University, in CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2010Table of ContentsContributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction: The Short Story as the Genre of Cultural Transition. LYUDMILA PARTS. Chekhov’s “The Darling”: Femininity Scorned and Desired. SVETLANA EVDOKIMOVA. Bunin’s “Gentle Breath.” LEV VYGOTSKY. Ekphrasis in Isaak Babel (“Pan Apolek,”“My First Goose”). ROBERT MAGUIRE. Zoshchenko’s “Electrician,” or the Complex Theatrical Mechanism. ALEKSANDER ZHOLKOVSKY.Yury Olesha’s Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of “Liompa.” ANDREW BARRATT. Nabokov’s Art of Memory: Recollected Emotion in “Spring in Fialta” (1936-1947). JOHN BURT FOSTER, JR. Child Perspective: Tradition and Experiment. An Analysis of “The Childhood of Lovers” by Boris Pasternak. FIONA BJORLING. Andrei Platonov and the Inadmissibility of Desire (“The River Potudan”). ERIC NAIMAN. “This Could Have Been Foreseen”: Kharms’s “The Old Woman” (Starukha) Revisited. A Collective Analysis. ROBIN MILNER-GULLAND. Testimony as Art: Varlam Shalamov’s “Condensed Milk.” LEONA TOKER. The Writer as Criminal: Abram Tertz’s “Pkhents.” CATHARINE THEIMER NEPOMNYASHCHY. Vasilii Shukshin’s “Cut Down to Size” (Srezal) and the Question of Transition. DIANE IGNASHEVNEMEC. Carnivalization of the Short Story Genre and the Künstlernovelle: Tatiana Tolstaia’s “The Poet and the Muse.”, ERICA GREBER. Down the Intertextual Lane: Petrushevskaia, Chekhov, Tolstoy (“The Lady With the Dogs”)., LYUDMILA PARTS. “The Lady with the Dogs,” by Lyudmila Petrushevskaia. Translated by Krystyna Anna Steiger. Russian Postmodernist Fiction and Mythologies of History: Viacheslav Pietsukh’s “The Central-Ermolaevo War” and Viktor Erofeev’s “Parakeet.” MARK LIPOVETSKY. Psychosis and Photography: Andrei Bitov’s “Pushkin’s Photograph.” SVEN SPIEKER. The “Traditional Postmodernism” of Viktor Pelevin’s Short Story “Nika.” OLGA BOGDANOVA.

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Book SynopsisThe renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy created a realistic masterpiece in "Anna Karenina" (1878). In the same work, moreover, he utilized allegory and symbol to an extent and at a level of sophistication unknown in his other works. In Browning's study, the author identifies and analyses previously unnoticed or only briefly mentioned 'linkages and keystones' found in two highly developed clusters of symbols, arising from Anna's momentous train ride and peasant nightmares, and of allegories, rooted in Vronsky's disastrous steeplechase. Within this labyrinth of symbol and allegory lies embedded much of the novel's most significant meaning. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Russian literature, Tolstoy, symbol, allegory, structuralism, and moral criticism.Trade Review"Recent scholarship has by and large taken Tolstoy’s reference to the "labyrinth of linkages" in Anna Karenina to indicate the dense and complicated network of interrelated an mutually illuminating images that create pathways to explicating the novel's many possible meanings. However, a labyrinth in the classical sense in unicursal: one sinuous route leads from the outside into the center. The hermeneutic of Gary L. Browning's book wore closely aligns with this second conception." -- Julie W. de Sherbinin, Colby College * The Russian Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements. Author's Note. Introduction. Chapter 1: Symbolism: The Train Ride. Chapter 2: Symbolism: The Muzhik (Peasant). Chapter 3: Allegory: The Steeplechase Participants. Chapter 4: Allegory: The Steeplechase's Recurring Motifs. Chapter 5: Comparison of Early and Final Drafts Containing the Steeplechase Allegory and the Muzhik Symbol. Conclusion. Select Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisLate- and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader is an introduction to the most important works of Russian literature of the last fifty years. Organised both chronologically and thematically, it is a structured presentation of significant cultural developments and literary works intended for wide use in undergraduate courses on Russian literature and culture. Each chapter includes a selection of literary texts, excerpts from the Russian press, and scholarly writings that help to elucidate the relationship between art, its historical and cultural contexts, and its reception. Much of the reader’s contents will appear in English translation for the first time. At present, no anthology of late- and post-Soviet writing exists. Late- and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader addresses this absence, and brings university curricula in Russian literature, culture, history, and area studies into the twenty-first century.Trade Review"[O]ffers an unrivaled collection of Russian literary works in English from the perestroika and early post-Soviet periods. The book also offers valuable secondary works of criticism by well-known scholars in contemporary Russian literature... Late and Post-Soviet Literature offers an authentic, thoughtful, and carefully curated collection of texts and criticism, filling a need for works on this time period. It is an ideal text for use in an undergraduate course on contemporary Russian literature in translation, and, in fact, could be used alone for this purpose and/or in combination with full novels. If the first volume is any indication, we have much to look forward to in the second volume on the Thaw and Stagnation periods." - Slavic and East European Journal, 59.2 (Summer 2015)

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Book SynopsisThe renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy created a realistic masterpiece in Anna Karenina (1878). In the same work, moreover, he utilized allegory and symbol to an extent and at a level of sophistication unknown in his other works. In Browning’s study, the author identifies and analyzes previously unnoticed or only briefly mentioned “linkages and keystones” found in two highly developed clusters of symbols, arising from Anna’s momentous train ride and peasant nightmares, and of allegories, rooted in Vronsky’s disastrous steeplechase. Within this labyrinth of symbol and allegory lies embedded much of the novel’s most significant meaning. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Russian literature, Tolstoy, symbol, allegory, structuralism, and moral criticism.Trade Review"Recent scholarship has by and large taken Tolstoy’s reference to the "labyrinth of linkages" in Anna Karenina to indicate the dense and complicated network of interrelated an mutually illuminating images that create pathways to explicating the novel's many possible meanings. However, a labyrinth in the classical sense in unicursal: one sinuous route leads from the outside into the center. The hermeneutic of Gary L. Browning's book wore closely aligns with this second conception." -- Julie W. de Sherbinin, Colby College * The Russian Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements. Author's Note. Introduction. Chapter 1: Symbolism: The Train Ride. Chapter 2: Symbolism: The Muzhik (Peasant). Chapter 3: Allegory: The Steeplechase Participants. Chapter 4: Allegory: The Steeplechase's Recurring Motifs. Chapter 5: Comparison of Early and Final Drafts Containing the Steeplechase Allegory and the Muzhik Symbol. Conclusion. Select Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisA collection of essays by Irina Reyfman, a leading scholar of Russian literature and culture. Ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the essays focus on the interaction of life and literature. In the first part, Reyfman examines how obligatory state service and the Table of Ranks shaped Russian writers' view of themselves as professionals, raising questions about whether the existence of the rank system prompted the development of specifically Russian types of literary discourse. The sections that follow bring together articles on Pushkin, writer and man, as seen by himself and others, essays on Leo Tolstoy, and other aspects of Russian literary and cultural history. In addition to examining little-studied writers and works, Rank and Style offers new approaches to well-studied literary personalities and texts. Trade ReviewIrina Reyfman is that rare scholar who reads contexts as subtly and as insightfully as she reads texts. In this volume the range and depth are are exceptional, stretching from the early eighteenth century to the twentieth and from duels, to love, to flogging, to the bureaucracy, and to the eternal, in short, to what draws readers to the classic Russian texts she analyzes and contextualizes with such convincing originality. Anyone who reads or teaches Russian history and literature will find this book both engaging and illuminating." —William Mills Todd III|Reyfman (Russian Literature, Columbia U.) presents 15 articles written between the early 1990s and now, most of which have been previously published. She has made revisions and translated articles originally published in Russian and has grouped them in four thematic sections, each of which she introduces. The first section, which includes her most recent investigations, concerns the Table of Ranks and how it shaped Russian writers' work. Following are articles on Pushkin, Tolstoy, and, in the last section, several articles that are not tightly united by theme, on Alexey Rzhevsky, Mikhail Murav'ev and Semyon Bobrov, and Leskov's response to Dostoevsky. —Book News, Inc.|"[Reyfman's] insights are always well grounded, perceptive and productive. The present selection is an impressive testimony to her range and conviction that a sympathetic understanding of the social framework underpinning Russian noble culture enriches our appreciation of Russian literature." –W. Gareth Jones, Bangor University; review published in the Slavonic & East European Review, 91, 3, July 2013|Overall, this is an excellent volume that will have something to offer a variety of readers. . . . the quality of the scholarship remains high throughout." --John Ellison, independent scholar; review published in the Slavic and East European Journal, 57.3 (Fall 2013).|"[The essays here] are gathered under a title so all-embracing as to encompass the extraordinary range of the author’s engagement with Russian cultural history, from the philosophical concerns of eighteenth-century poetry to the rituals of dueling. . . but including too the pervasive influence of class and chin, sexual mores, codes of honour, attitudes to death and madness, and much else besides." –John McNair, University of Queensland, in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. LV, Nos. 1-2, March-June 2013

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Book SynopsisEssays on Russian Literature: Moral-Philosophical Configurations combines discussions of ethical, esthetic and philosophical interest raised, by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky, with close analyses of their texts. This book focuses on four thematic configurations: first (''Chance and Fate''): issues of freedom and responsibility, the necessity of free individual expression and yet the limits of will, or self-will; second (''Two Kinds of Beauty''): the unity of moral, esthetic, and spiritual categories, and the quest for the ideal; third (''Critical Perspectives''): examples of commentary that approaches art with a unified ethical and spiritual perspective (Dostoevsky, Gorky, V.I. Ivanov, and the partially dissenting Bakhtin); and fourth (''Poems of Parting''): three poems (works by Tyutchev, Severyanin, and Pushkin) involving parting, loss and recovery.Trade Review“This collection of essays is neither a history of Russian literature in disguise nor is it a collection of separate interpretations of great Russian books. Close Encounters is an answer, a new answer to the old question of what to look for in Russian literature. . . For sheer power of convincing argument and didactic knowhow, Close Encounters, I think, can only be compared to the essays of T. S. Eliot. They need no introduction. Try reading any single one of them and you will find yourself reading all of them.” —Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Universität Heidelberg"Serves as an excellent example of lucid, accessible literary criticism that will inform and inspire students at all levels. Highly recommended." —C. A. Rydel, formerly, Grand Valley State University, in CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, November 2013“Jackson’s luminous selection of his own critical writings over the past half-century is based overwhelmingly on close reading, immediate contexts, and direct quotation. Get all three right, he seems to suggest, and the literary critic can leap to the artist’s integral worldview in an instant. . . . Will this collection become the Essential or Portable Robert Louis Jackson? Probably not; Jackson has more to write . . . the reader senses in the final two essays that Jackson is on the edge of big new interests: in Goethe, Zhukovsky, Nabokov. This is exactly the sense one wants from essays that stretch over half a century, on some of the greatest writers in the world.” —Caryl Emerson, Princeton University. Review published in The Russian Review, January 2014 (Vol. 73, No. 1)

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Book SynopsisWhy do Israelis dislike fantasy? Put so bluntly, the question appears frivolous. But in fact, it goes to the deepest sources of Israeli historical identity and literary tradition. Uniquely among developed nations, Israel’s origin is in a utopian novel, Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902), which predicted the future Jewish state. The Jewish writing in the Diaspora has always tended toward the fantastic, the mystical, and the magical. And yet, from its very inception, Israeli literature has been stubbornly realistic. The present volume challenges this stance. Originally published in Hebrew in 2009, it is the first serious, wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated exploration of fantasy in Israeli literature and culture. Its contributors jointly attempt to contest the question posed at the beginning: why do Israelis, living in a country whose very existence is predicated on the fulfilment of a utopian dream, distrust fantasy?Trade Review“From the Talmudic sages to Bashevis-Singer, from medieval story-tellers to young contemporary Israeli writers, Jewish fantasy has been a treasure trove of the imagination, at least on a par with Greek and Norse mythologies. Yet unlike them, it has only rarely received scholarly attention. That is why this volume is so badly needed, and so timely, as interest in fantasy is becoming more intense worldwide.”–Emanuel Lottem, co-founder and first chairperson, Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy

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Book SynopsisTheatres world-wide embrace Chekhov's handful of plays with a fervour second only to Shakespeare's. Whatever their native language or culture, audiences often see themselves in his Russian characters, making Chekhov seem an author who easily transcends his own culture and time. Nonetheless, students, actors, and audiences alike are often initially puzzled by Chekhov's dramatic texts. Are they comic or tragic, ironic or sincere, starkly familiar or willfully elusive? How can his often seemingly irrelevant dialogue create dynamic performances? In his stories and plays alike, Chekhov challenges his readers to diagnose his characters' desires, opinions, heartaches and joys in the same way that doctors diagnose illness by attending closely to apparently trivial details. In the plays where narrative voice is absent and characters speak for themselves reading under a microscope becomes all the more necessary. The expert attention that Carnicke pays to the performative dimensions of Chekhov's plays makes her book unique among the published guides to Chekhov's works. Trade Review“A strong background in Russian language and culture, combined with professional theater experience as an actress and director, prepared Sharon Carnicke not only to translate Chekhov’s plays for performance but also to illuminate the mysteries of his works for theater artists preparing to stage the plays. Certainly it is actors and directors who have the most to gain from this ‘guide to the plays,’ which also serves as an intelligent introductory study for general readers. Carnicke covers the basics—transliteration, how Russian names are used, capsule biography, late nineteenth-century theatrical genres—while offering enough fresh insight into Chekhov’s world and his work to hold the interest of those already familiar with the plays.” —Felicia Hardison Londré , University of Missouri–Kansas City. Review published in The Russian Review, January 2014 (Vol. 73, No. 1)

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