Dostoevsky attached introductions to his most challenging narratives, including Notes from the House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov, and A Gentle Creature. Despite his clever attempts to call his readers' attention to these introductions, they have been neglected as an object of study for over 150 years. That oversight is rectified in First Words, the fi…
Acta Slavica Estonica is an international series of publications on current issues of Russian and other Slavic languages, literatures and cultures. This volume This volume is devoted to the interrelations of the prominent Estonian writer Jaan Kross (1920–2007) with Russian literature and culture. It includes contributions on the poetics of some of Kross' works ("The Czar's Madman", "Professor…
Early 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…
Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky is a collection of essays with a broad interdisciplinary focus. It includes contributions by leading Dostoevsky scholars, social scientists, scholars of religion and philosophy. The volume considers aesthetics, philosophy, theology, and science of the 19th century Russia and the West that might have informed Dostoevsky's thought and art. Issues such as evolutionary …
"Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange. As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been i…
The 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 …
Nina Sadur, the playwright, occupies a prominent place in the Soviet/Russian drama pantheon of the 1980s and 1990s, a group that has with few exceptions been generally ignored by the Western literary establishment. The plays included in this volume offer some of Sadur's most influential works for the theater to the English-speaking audience for the first time. The collection will appeal to read…
Across the twentieth century war was the central experience of the Russian people, spurring tales of the struggles and advances of the combat hero to become a prevailing Russian literary trope. In this wide spanning text Brintlinger traces the war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladko…
Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recogni…
Academic Studies Press is proud to present this translation of Professor Andrei Zorin's seminal Kormya Dvuglavogo Orla. This collection of essays includes several that have never before appeared in English, including The People's War: The Time of Troubles in Russian Literature, 1806-1807 and Holy Alliances: V. A. Zhukovskii's Epistle To Emperor Alexander and Christian Universalism.