Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia

Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia PDF Author: Yelena Zotova
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793605599
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
In Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia, Yelena Zotova argues that the concept of envy underwent a peculiar transformation in the Russian Modernist prose of the 1920s due to a series of radical shifts in societal values, with each subsequent change thwarting Russia’s volatile axiological hierarchy. Industriousness and austerity, inferior to playful genius in Pushkin’s “Mozart and Salieri,” became virtues, while the intrinsic value of nonutilitarian art was officially nullified by the Bolshevik state.Consequently, a new literary type emerged, and envy, described as “wingless desire” by Russia’s chief poet Alexander Pushkin, obtained new ownership as the envied became the envier. Superimposing twentieth-century theories of envy onto Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero in the Aesthetic Activity” (1923), Zotova proposes that Salieri’s envy could be the wingless embryo of the Bakhtinian authorship.

Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia

Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia PDF Author: Yelena Zotova
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793605599
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
In Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia, Yelena Zotova argues that the concept of envy underwent a peculiar transformation in the Russian Modernist prose of the 1920s due to a series of radical shifts in societal values, with each subsequent change thwarting Russia’s volatile axiological hierarchy. Industriousness and austerity, inferior to playful genius in Pushkin’s “Mozart and Salieri,” became virtues, while the intrinsic value of nonutilitarian art was officially nullified by the Bolshevik state.Consequently, a new literary type emerged, and envy, described as “wingless desire” by Russia’s chief poet Alexander Pushkin, obtained new ownership as the envied became the envier. Superimposing twentieth-century theories of envy onto Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero in the Aesthetic Activity” (1923), Zotova proposes that Salieri’s envy could be the wingless embryo of the Bakhtinian authorship.

Literary Biographies in The Lives of Remarkable People Series in Russia

Literary Biographies in The Lives of Remarkable People Series in Russia PDF Author: Carol Ueland
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793618305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely divergent political and cultural epochs: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russia. The authors argue that the treatment of biographical figures in the series is a case study for continuities and changes in Russian national identity over time. Biography in Russia and elsewhere remains a most influential literary genre and the distinctive approach and branding of the series has made it the economic engine of its publisher, Molodaia gvardiia. The centrality of biographies of major literary figures in the series reflects their heightened importance in Russian culture. The contributors examine the ways that biographies of Russia's foremost writers shaped the literary canon while mirroring the political and social realities of both the subjects’ and their biographers' times. Starting with Alexander Pushkin and ending with Joseph Brodsky, the authors analyze the interplay of research and imagination in biographical narrative, the changing perceptions of what constitutes literary greatness, and the subversive possibilities of biography during eras of political censorship.

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind PDF Author: Nicole Svobodny
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793653542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing. Through close textual analysis combined with intellectual biography and literary theory, Nicole Svobodny puts the spotlight on Nijinsky as reader. She elucidates Nijinsky's riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, equating these intertextual connections to "marking" a dance, whereby the dancer uses a reduction strategy situated between thinking and doing. By exploring the intersections of bodily movement with verbal language, this book addresses broader questions of how we sense and make sense of our worlds. Drawing on archival research, along with studies in psychology and philosophy, Svobodny emphasizes the modernist contexts from which the dancer-writer emerged at the end of World War I. Nijinsky began his life-writing—a book he titled Feeling—the day after the Paris Peace Conference opened, and the same day he performed his "last dance." Nijinsky's Feeling Mind begins with the dancer on stage and concludes as he invites readers into his private room. Illuminating the structure, plot, medium, and mode of Feeling, this study calls on readers to grapple with a paradox: the more the dancer insists on his writing as a live performance, the more he points to the material object that entombs it.

Napoleon in the Russian Imaginary

Napoleon in the Russian Imaginary PDF Author: Gary Rosenshield
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666925233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Napoleon today is still a figure who fascinates both his admirers and detractors because of his seminal role in European history at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, straddling the French Revolution and the enormous empire that he fashioned through military conquest. Napoleon in the Russian Imaginary focuses on the response of Russia's greatest writers—poets, novelists, critics, and historians—to the idea of "Great Man" as an agent of transformational change as it manifests itself in the person and career of Napoleon. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and his subsequent exile to St. Helena, in much of Europe a re-evaluation of Napoleon's person, stature, and historical significance occurred, as thinkers and writers witnessed the gradual reestablishment of repressive regimes throughout Europe. This re-evaluation in Russia would have to wait until Napoleon's death in 1821, but when it came to pass, it continued to occupy the imagination of Russia's greatest writers for over 130 years. Although Napoleon's invasion of Russia and subsequent defeat had a profound effect on Russian culture and Russian history, for Russian writers what was most important was the universal significance of Napoleon’s desire for world conquest and the idea of unbridled ambition which he embodied. Russian writers saw this, for good or ill, as potentially determining the spiritual and moral fate of future generations. What is particularly fascinating is their attempt to confront each other about this idea in a creative dialogue, with each succeeding writer addressing himself and responding to his predecessor and predecessors.

Russian Literature and Cognitive Science

Russian Literature and Cognitive Science PDF Author: Tom Dolack
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666941700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Russian Literature and Cognitive Science applies the newest insights from cognitive psychology to the study of Russian literature. Chapters focus on writers and cultural figures from the Golden to the Internet Age including: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Sologub, Bely, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Baranskaya, and contemporary online discourse. The authors draw on a wide array of cognitively-informed fields within psychology and related disciplines and approaches such as social psychology, visual processing, conceptual blending, cognitive narratology, the study of autism, cognitive approaches to creativity, the medical humanities, reader reception theory, cognitive anthropology, psychopathology, psychoanalysis, Theory of Mind, visual processing, embodied cognition, and predictive processing. This volume demonstrates how useful a tool cognitive science is for the analysis of literary texts.

Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution

Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution PDF Author: Lonny Harrison
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498597998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution: Sow the Wind, Reap the Storm is a panoramic history of the Russian intelligentsia and an analysis of the language and ideals of the Russian Revolution, from its inception over the long nineteenth century through fruition in early Soviet society. This volume examines metaphors for revolution in the storm, flood, and harvest imagery ubiquitous in Russian literary works. At the same time, it considers the struggle to own the narrative of modernity, including Bolshevik weaponization of language and cultural policy that supported the use of terror and social purging. This uniquely cross-disciplinary study conducts a close reading of texts that use storm, flood, and agricultural metaphors in diverse ways to represent revolution, whether in anticipation and celebration of its ideals or in resistance to the same. A spotlight is given to the lives and works of authors who responded to Soviet authoritarianism by reclaiming the narrative of revolution in the name of personal freedom and restoration of humanist values. Hinging on the clashes of culture wars and class wars and residing at the intersection of ideas at the very core of the fight for modernity, this book provides a critical reading of authoritarian discourse and investigates rare examples of the counter narratives that thrived in spite of their suppression.

Dostoevsky as Suicidologist

Dostoevsky as Suicidologist PDF Author: Amy D. Ronner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793607826
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
In Dostoevsky as Suicidologist, Amy D. Ronner illustrates how self-homicide in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction prefigures Emile Durkheim’s etiology in Suicide as well as theories of other prominent suicidologists. This book not only fills a lacuna in Dostoevsky scholarship, but provides fresh readings of Dostoevsky’s major works, including Notes from The House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Ronner provides an exegesis of how Dostoevsky’s implicit awareness of fatalistic, altruistic, egoistic, and anomic modes of self-destruction helped shape not only his philosophy, but also his craft as a writer. In this study, Ronner contributes to the field of suicidology by anatomizing both self-destructive behavior and suicidal ideation while offering ways to think about prevention. But most expansively, Ronner tackles the formidable task of forging a ligature between artistic creation and the pluripresent social fact of self-annihilation.

Nostalgia, Anxiety, Politics: Media and Performing Arts in Egypt, Central-Eastern Europe, and Russia

Nostalgia, Anxiety, Politics: Media and Performing Arts in Egypt, Central-Eastern Europe, and Russia PDF Author: Tetyana Dzyadevych
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This volume shows that the cultural production of nostalgia is a major tool for structuring feelings of resentment and anxiety. The current volume is concerned with collective nostalgia as it has been elicited, channeled, and weaponized by media production agents. The book aims to analyze how the performing arts and media (music, cinema, TV, etc.) generate and shape the feeling of collective nostalgia. It shows how the cultural production of nostalgia reflects distinct social-political contexts and serves particular political purposes. The collective monograph prioritizes cases from the post-Soviet context. However, the authors do not argue that the collapse of the socialist bloc in general, and the USSR in particular, has established some unique nostalgic precedent. The book claims that mechanisms of producing nostalgia and marshaling it for political purposes are broadly similar in most (modern or postmodern) settings. It is not our intent to demonize Russia, nor do we want Russia to be our dominant frame of reference, even if, in most of our cases here, 'nolens volens' appeared first in Russia-centric post-Soviet discourse. The “Russian bloc” has been placed in the second part of the book in order to give primacy to non-Russian subjects.

Political History and Culture of Russia

Political History and Culture of Russia PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Scholarly articles dealing with political events in Russia up to 1991.

American Girls in Red Russia

American Girls in Red Russia PDF Author: Julia L. Mickenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625612X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.