Lazar Fleishman - Böcker

The 20th century in the Baltic region had it all. The turbulent century did not spare the small territory and its population, which was visited by practically every calamity the modern era had to offer. At westward edge of the Russian Empire, the region was subjected to the harsh Russification drive of the late imperial era. With diverse religions and nationalities and its geographic buffer between the Empire and the German Reich, it was also the crucible of key battles during and mass refugee crises following World War I. In the interwar period, the rise of the independent Baltic States precipitated myriad political experiments and population politics together with constant maneuvering to preserve their fragile and ultimately short-lived sovereignty. World War II ushered in a period of unprecedented extremes with waves of brutal occupations, deportations, the Holocaust, the subjection of the territory to the communist experiment, and ultimately, the decimation of state sovereignty for the next four decades.The almost unavoidable outcome of this course of events has been the focus on the region from the point of view of the large powers that sought to dominate and shape it. The rather limited number of foreign scholars who command Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, fortified this orientation in the writing of the history of the region. The present volume seeks to shift the attention to the local point of view through the writing of Baltic scholars. By no means a comprehensive expose, the essays nevertheless explore key junctures in the history of the three Baltic countries as viewed “from within,” both then and now.

This volume dedicated to Ronald Vroon, Professor of The University of California, Los Angeles, a distinguished scholar of Russian literature, covers a wide range of topics reflecting his broad research interests (various periods in the history of Russian literature in its relationships with visual art, political life, and church). It brings together leading international specialists in the field – Nikolay Bogomolov (Moscow), Aleksandr Dolinin (Madison/WI), Lazar Fleishman (Stanford), Stefano Garzonio (Pisa), Viach. Vs. Ivanov (Moscow-Los Angeles), Marcus Levitt (Los Angeles), Aleksandr Ospovat (Moscow), Fedor Poljakov (Vienna), Roman Timenchik (Jerusalem), Willem Weststeijn (Amsterdam), Viktor Zhivov (Moscow-Berkeley), Aleksandr Zholkovsky (Los Angeles) and others. The book contains 19 contributions in Russian language, and 2 in English.

The volume consists of 27 essays dedicated to Vladimir Khazan, the leading specialist in Russian-Jewish relationship and in the study of 20th century Russian literature. The essays deal with Blok, Bely, Akhmatova, Babel, Jabotinsky, Remizov, and Nabokov. The volume introduces unknown documents and facts that elucidate new aspects of Polish-Russian, German-Russian, Russian-Baltic, and Russian-French literary contacts, reveal unknown details about post-Stalinist Soviet "samizdat" and the story of publication of Pasternak’s "Doctor Zhivago". Among the contributors are such distinguished scholars as Konstantin Azadovsky, Oleg Budnitskii, Stefano Garzonio, Mirja Lecke, Leonid Livak, Magnus Ljunggren, Paolo Mancosu, Piotr Mitzner, Boris Ravdin, and Roman Timenchik

This volume is dedicated to Fedor B. Poljakov, Professor of the University of Vienna, a distinguished specialist in the history of Russian culture and Germano-Slavic cultural relations. It brings together scholars from leading universities in the United States, Europe and the Russian Federation. Thirty-seven essays discuss a broad array of themes ranging from early-modern Muscovy and Slavia Orthodoxa to Russia’s contacts with the West from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries to modernist literature to early Soviet poetry and post-revolutionary emigration. The articles present unknown archival documents and offer new perspectives on the study of Russian literature in a comparative context.