A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism
This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas--political, intellectual, and institutional--the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic paleontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more "humanized" literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the "long" 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in émigré literary theory and criticism.
Reference Guide to Russian Literature
Routledge Companion to Russian Literature
The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is an engaging and accessible guide to Russian writing of the past thousand years. The volume covers the entire span of Russian literature, from the Middle Ages to the post-Soviet period, and explores all the forms that have made it so famous: poetry, drama and, of course, the Russian novel. A particular emphasis is given to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Russian literature achieved world-wide recognition through the works of writers such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. Covering a range of subjects including women's writing, Russian literary theory, socialist realism and émigré writing, leading international scholars open up the wonderful diversity of Russian literature. With recommended lists of further reading and an excellent up-to-date general bibliography, The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is the perfect guide for students and general readers alike.
Rank and Style
Rank and Style is a collection of essays by Irina Reyfman, a leading scholar of Russian literature and culture. Ranging in topic 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 littlestudied writers and works, Rank and Style offers new approaches to well-studied literary personalities and texts.
The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture
This book is the first interdisciplinary treatment of the cultural significance of the Decembrists' mythic image in Russian literature, history, film and opera in a survey of its deployment as cultural trope since the original 1825 rebellion and through the present day.
The Superstitious Muse
For 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.
Russian Literature
For most English-speaking readers, Russian literature consists of asmall number of individual writers ? nineteenth-centurymasters such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev ? or a fewwell-known works ? Chekhov's plays, Brodsky's poems, andperhaps Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago fromthe twentieth century. The medieval period, as well as thebrilliant tradition of Russian lyric poetry from the eighteenthcentury to the present, are almost completely terraincognita, as are the complex prose experiments of NikolaiGogol, Nikolai Leskov, Andrei Belyi, and Andrei Platonov.Furthermore, those writers who have made an impact are generallyknown outside of the contexts in which they wrote and in whichtheir work has been received. In this engaging book, Andrew Baruch Wachtel and Ilya Vinitskyprovide a comprehensive, conceptually challenging history ofRussian literature, including prose, poetry and drama. Each of theten chapters deals with a bounded time period from medievalRus? to the present. In a number of cases, chapters overlapchronologically, thereby allowing a given period to be seen in morethan one context. To tell the story of each period, the authorsprovide an introductory essay touching on the highpoints of itsdevelopment and then concentrate on one biography, one literary orcultural event, and one literary work, which serve as prismsthrough which the main outlines of a given period?sdevelopment can be discerned. Although the focus is on literature,individual works, lives and events are placed in broad historicalcontext as well as in the framework of parallel developments inRussian art and music
Russian Literature
This book is intended to capture the interest of anyone who has been attracted to Russian culture through the greats of Russian literature, either through the texts themselves, or encountering them in the cinema, or opera.Rather than a conventional chronology of Russian literature, the book will explore the place and importance of literature of all sorts in Russian culture. How and when did a Russian national literature come into being? What shaped its creation? How have the Russians regarded their literary language?The book will uses the figure of Pushkin, 'the Russian Shakespeare' as a recurring example as his work influenced every Russian writer who came after hime, whether poets or novelists. It will look at such questions as why Russian writers are venerated, how they've been interpreted inside Russia andbeyond, and the influences of such things as the folk tale tradition, orthodox religion, and the West.
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