The Cossack Myth

The Cossack Myth PDF Author: Serhii Plokhy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702210X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
The fascinating story of The History of the Rus', one of the most influential historical texts of the modern era.

The Cossack Myth

The Cossack Myth PDF Author: Serhii Plokhy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702210X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
The fascinating story of The History of the Rus', one of the most influential historical texts of the modern era.

Life Is Elsewhere

Life Is Elsewhere PDF Author: Anne Lounsbery
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501747932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.

Intersections and Transpositions

Intersections and Transpositions PDF Author: Andrew Wachtel
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810115804
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This collection serves as an introduction to the great variety of approaches being used by Slavicists and historians to situate music and literature in the Russian cultural imagination. Part I focuses on music in art. The nine essays in this section explore the complex interaction of literary and musical texts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors discuss such writers as Pushkin, Chekhov, and Pasternak, and composers including Musorgsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Blok. Part II centers on music in life. Its five essays address music as a cultural form, as presented and enjoyed in the home, the theater, and the opera house. This book provides a unique window on The musical, literary, and social interactions that have been typical of modern Russian culture.Contributing to this volume are Thomas P. Hodge, Caryl Emerson, Jennifer Fuller, Justin Weir, Alexander Burry, James Morgan, Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Tim Langen, Jesse Langen, Richard Stites, Ilya Vinitsky, Julie Buckler, Rosamund Bartlett, Boris Gasparov, Nicholas Glossop, and Amy Nelson.

Between Heaven and Hell

Between Heaven and Hell PDF Author: G. Diment
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137089148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Siberia has no history of independent political existence, no claim to a separate ethnic identity, and no clear borders. Yet, it could be said that the elusive country 'behind the Urals' is the most real and the most durable part of the Russian landscape. For centuries, Siberia has been represented as Russia's alter ego,as the heavenly or infernal antithesis to the perceived complexity or shallowness of Russian life. It has been both the frightening heart of darkness and a fabulous land of plenty; the 'House of the Dead' and the realm of utter freedom; a frozen wasteland and a colourful frontier; a dumping ground for Russia's rejects and the last refuge of its lost innocence. The contributors to Between Heaven and Hell examine the origin, nature, and implications of these images from historical, literary, geographical, anthropological, and linguistic perspectives. They create a striking, fascinating picture of this enormous and mysterious land.

Russia's Orient

Russia's Orient PDF Author: Daniel R. Brower
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253211132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
From a 1994 conference (U. of California, Berkeley), Borderlands Research Group participants present their findings based on unprecedented access to the hinterlands of what is the now the CIS. Fourteen contributors provide context for the current self- deterministic ethnic turmoil in Chechyna and elsewhere far from the Kremlin, via discussions of tsarist colonial policies and historical, heartland majority attitudes toward the "ignoble savages and unfaithful subjects" (read Muslim) of Russia's diverse Orient. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Social Functions of Literature

Social Functions of Literature PDF Author: Paul Debreczeny
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804726627
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This study of the effect of literature on readers, both as individuals and as members of social groups, focuses on Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, as a model for investigating the aesthetic and social functions of literature. The individual reader's response to the literary text is demonstrated in Part One through a broad range of memoirs, diaries, and correspondences in which Russian readers recorded their reactions to Pushkin. Among the reactions are testimonies that Pushkin's works helped readers form their personalities, provided cathartic relief in times of stress, and aided them in releasing their suppressed emotions. In his analysis, the author draws on various psychological approaches, from studies of perception through developmental psychology to psychoanalysis. Part Two exposes the extent to which individuals' aesthetic responses are conditioned by their social environment. Against the backdrop of Russian social history in the early nineteenth century, the author describes the dissemination of new aesthetic norms, notably the relations of the Russian literary elite to "lowbrow" and "middlebrow" groups. In this context, he analyzes a number of Pushkin imitations (with Pushkin's responses to them) and links Nikolai Gogol's development as a writer to the social groups surrounding Pushkin. Among the other topics discussed are the popularization of Pushkin on the stage and his inclusion in school textbooks and anthologies. The aura surrounding the personality of an author is the subject of Part Three, in which the author shows how Pushkin's death in a duel with a foreigner contributed to his emergence as a symbol of the Russian nation, and how deep-seated anxiety about national identity gave rise to the Pushkin myth and to the canonization of the poet as martyr. The author also describes how the combined effect of the widespread reading of Pushkin's work and his legend as martyr allowed him to remain Russia's main mythic figure despite the Soviet Union's attempts to supplant him with Lenin. Throughout the book, theoretical arguments are buttressed by close readings of Pushkin's works, especially The Prisoner of the Caucasus, Eugene Onegin, Poltava, Egyptian Nights, and several lyric poems.

The Russian Image of Goethe, Volume 1

The Russian Image of Goethe, Volume 1 PDF Author: Andre von Gronicka
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512808237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The University of Pennsylvania Press is pleased to reissue in two volumes von Gronicka's study. The first volume discusses the early Russian reaction to Goethe and his work and his effect on Zhukovski (Goethe's translator and interpreter), Pushkin, Lermontov, the Pushkin Pleiade and the Decembrists, the Russian Romanticists, and the Westerners (Stankevich, Belinksi, and Herzen).

Pushkin on Literature

Pushkin on Literature PDF Author: Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810116153
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
Pushkin on Literature approaches Pushkin's literary accomplishment from a unique perspective: it focuses on Pushkin the critic, and on his fascination with the literary world that surrounded him. This is the only English-language edition of the complete set of Pushkin's critical writing, both on his own work and on the wide range of European literature -- Byron, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Milton -- which he read and studied, and Which so profoundly influenced his own writing. These extracts from Pushkin's letters, articles, and working notes provide a complete chronological record of the artist's literary evolution, and provide a fascinating glimpse into the poet's intellectual passions.

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I PDF Author: Patrick O’Meara
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1788315669
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The reign of Alexander I was a pivotal moment in the construction of Russia's national mythology. This work examines this crucial period focusing on the place of the Russian nobility in relation to their ruler, and the accompanying debate between reform and the status quo, between a Russia old and new, and between different visions of what Russia could become. Drawing on extensive archival research and placing a long-neglected emphasis on this aspect of Alexander I's reign, this book is an important work for students and scholars of imperial Russia, as well as the wider Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period in Europe.

Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin

Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin PDF Author: William Mills Todd
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674299450
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Todd describes the ideology of the educated westernized gentry, then charts the possibilities for literary life: first patronage, the salons, popular literature; then rapid emergence of an incipient literary profession. He explores the interactions of literature and society as writers "discovered" their own milieu and were discovered by it.