Russian and East European Studies

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 and beyond, and the influences of such things as the folk tale tradition, orthodox religion, and the West.

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 emigre 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.

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.

"This collection offers a treasure trove of primary sources of interest to students of women's history. Carefully introduced and annotated, these documents illustrate the diversity of Russian women's lives." -Barbara Alpern Engel "There is no other work that offers such a wide variety of documents and such a successful combination of literary and historical materials." -Ann Hibner Koblitz This rich anthology of source materials makes available for the first time in any language a multitude of primary sources on the lives of Russian women from the reign of Peter the Great to the Bolshevik revolution. The selections are drawn from a wide variety of documents, published and unpublished, including memoirs, diaries, legal codes, correspondence, short fiction, poetry, ethnographic observations, and folklore. Primacy is given to sources produced by women and previously unavailable in English translation. Organized thematically, the documents focus on women's family life, work and schooling, public activism, creative self-expression, and sexuality and spirituality, as well as on the cultural ideals and legal framework which constrained women of all social classes.

Including examples from Russia's greatest poets, Michael Wachtel draws on three centuries of verse, from the beginnings of secular literature in the eighteenth century to the present day. The first part of his book is devoted to concepts such as versification, poetic language and tradition. In the second part he examines the ode, the elegy, love poetry, nature poetry and patriotic verse.

In the Thaw following Stalin's death, probing conversations about the nation's violent past took place in the literary journal Novyi mir (New World). Readers' letters reveal that discussion of the Terror was central to intellectual and political life during the USSR's last decades. Denis Kozlov shows how minds change, even in a closed society.