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This book explores the immense influence of the composer Richard Wagner on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian writers, musicians and artists.It contains a history of the production of Wagner's works in Russia and the Soviet Union (by directors including Meyerhold and Eisenstein), an account of Wagner's visit to Russia in 1863, and a detailed investigation of the impact of his music and ideas on the Russian Modernist movement. The last two chapters explore the fate of Wagner's works after the 1917 Revolution, when he was first hailed but then reviled, and finally rehabilitated during the years of glasnost. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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An introduction, complete in one volume, to the development of Russian literature from medieval times to the 1970s. Each chapter has been specially commissioned for this volume and the writers are noted scholars in their fields. The essays focus on the Russian language, the history of Russian writing and printing, and predominantly on the growth of a native Russian literature. This 1977 volume is unusual in combining a comprehensive study of Russian and Soviet literature with an introduction to the Russian language and an extensive treatment of Russian and Soviet drama. It is directed in part at the general reader and will also be consulted as a standard reference guide in libraries of universities, colleges, and schools wherever these subjects are read. It forms the second part of the three-volume Companion to Russian Studies, the first of which deals with Russian history, and the final part with Russian art and architecture. ... Read more

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The last couple of decades have been decisive for Russia not only in the political sphere; the period has also seen the rise and crystallization of Russian postmodernism. The essays, manifestos, and articles gathered here investigate various manifestations of this crucial cultural trend in:Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, offering both a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. A brief but useful "Who's Who in Russian Postmodernism" serves as an appendix. ... Read more

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One of the most influential short stories ever written, Nikolai Gogol's ‘‘The Overcoat’’ first appeared in 1842 as part of a four-volume publication of its author's Collected Works. The story is considered not only an early masterpiece of Russian Naturalism—a movement that would dominate the country's literature for generations—but a progenitor of the modern short story form itself. "We all came out from under Gogol's 'Overcoat'" is a remark that has been variously attributed to Dostoevsky and Turgenev. That either or both might have said it is an indication of the far-reaching significance of Gogol's work.

Gogol's writings have been seen as a bridge between the genres of romanticism and realism in Russian literature. Progressive critics of his day praised Gogol for grounding his prose fictions in the everyday lives of ordinary people, and they claimed him as a pioneer of a new "naturalist" aesthetic. Yet, Gogol viewed his work in a more conservative light, and his writing seems to incorporate as much fantasy and folklore as realistic detail. "The Overcoat," which was written sporadically over several years during a self-imposed exile in Geneva and Rome, is a particularly dazzling amalgam of these seemingly disparate tendencies in Gogol's writing. The story begins by taking its readers through the mundane and alienating world of a bureaucratic office in St. Petersburg where an awkward, impoverished clerk must scrimp and save in order to afford a badly needed new winter coat. As the story progresses, we enter a fairy-tale world of supernatural revenge, where the clerk's corpse is seen wandering city streets ripping coats off the backs of passersby. Gogol's story is both comic and horrific—at once a scathing social satire, moralistic fable, and psychological study.

In addition to "The Overcoat," this special edition also includes the novel length "Taras Bulba", "The Mysterious Portrait" and three other short stories, with a linked table of contents to each book and chapter in the collection.

List of Contents:

Introduction to the life of Nikolai Gogol
Book 1: The Overcoat
Book 2: Taras Bulba
Book 3: St. John's Eve
Book 4: The Cloak
Book 5: The Mysterious Portrait
Book 6: The Calash
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This collection of essays by and about the major Russian theorists includes Boris M. Èjxenbaum's "The Theory of the Formal Method," Viktor Sklovskij's "The Mystery Novel: Dickens's Little Dorrit," Roman Jakobson's "On Realism in Art," Mixail Baxtin's "Discourse Typology in Prose," and Osip M. Brik's "Contributions to the Study of Verse Language." Investigating the relationship of form and structure to the production of meaning in literature, these theorists laid the groundwork for the development of literary theory as a scientific discipline. A new introduction by Gerald L. Bruns provides a context for understanding why these works remain as important and influential now as when they were first written. ... Read more

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This book interprets the baffling complex of meanings attached by Russian culture to the concept of everyday life, or byt, and assesses its impact on Russian modernist narrative. Drawing on modern literary theory and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two aesthetic systems, one predominant in Western Catholic and Protestant cultures, the other reflected in Orthodox iconic traditions. He offers provocative, yet careful, readings of key narrative texts from the period. ... Read more

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This far-reaching collection of essays offers a serious and thought-provoking account of the complexities spawned by cross-cultural interpretation. The essays hold broad implications for issues spanning the range of literary criticism: the relations of text and context; the usefulness of genre as a defining term; the consequences of binary thinking; the links between practical criticism and literary theory; and--perhaps most explosively--from the visions and revisions invoked by shifting notions of nationality to the unpredictable attitudes toward gender and sexual difference entertained by the field of literary criticism at large. ... Read more

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The fourteen essays collected in this volume, while diverse in their subject matter and approach, share a common concern with regard to the thoughts of Mikhail Bakhtin. This concern, relating to the context in which we need to refer in order to understand the origins and the potential of Bakhtin's thought, is reflected in essays that are immediate and oblique, personal and impersonal, intellectual and theoretical in context. Five of the essays are by well-known Russian scholars whose work on Bakhtin has not previously been translated in English, while the remaining nine are by established and emerging Bakhtin specialists in North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe. ... Read more

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This anthology introduces readers to Tsarist Russia's emerging popular and commercial urban culture and the individuals and groups that produced and consumed it. The selections translated here illustrate in colorful detail how the experiences and the composition of Russian society and culture evolved from the late eighteenth century through the 1917 revolution, in response to economic, technological, and political changes. Fortunetelling and etiquette manuals, thieves' tales, children's literature, popular songs, war stories, women's novels, satires of life in America, and vaudeville skits are just a few of the genres represented.

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Russian Modernism began with the triumph of the symbolist style and survived until the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. It was an age bristling with visions of glorious or terrifying futures, with manifestos for new artistic movements, and with furious feuds between them. Utopias brings together Mikhail Bakhtin's celebrated analysis of "carnival culture"; reflections by painter and stage designer Leon Bakst and film director Sergei Einstein; and major texts by Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak; as well as many works by less well-known but equally talented figures. This richly illustrated collection offers an astonishing look at one of history's most stimulating artistic eras.

"Modernism everywhere entailed a drastic, dangerous breach with the past; in Russia it gained an extra impetus from an entire society's efforts to modernize itself. Utopias tells the whole whirligig story. . . . This is the Dr. Zhivago for highbrows!" --Peter Conrad, author of Modern Times, Modern Places: How Life and Art Were Transformed in a Century of Revolution, Innovation, and Radical Change ... Read more

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Pictures of Russian history and Russian literature (1897)


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English translations of Turgenev's First Love, Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband, Solzhenitsyn's The Incident at the Krechetovka Station, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilich and Chekhov's Ward Six. ... Read more

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This wide-ranging study presents an examination of the extraordinary diversity and range of satirical writing in contemporary Russian literature. Through the close analysis of seminal satirical texts written by five Russian and emigré authors in the 1970s and 1980s, Karen Ryan-Hayes demonstrates that formal and thematic parody is pervasive and that it provides additional levels of meaning in contemporary Russian satire. The author focuses on different subgenres of satire and offers practical criticism on each text. ... Read more