Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century – serie

Throughout the twentieth century war was at the forefront of the consciousness of the Russian people, and became a dominant trope to represent the Soviet experience in literature and other areas of cultural life. This book traces those war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in the literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Emmanuil Kazakevich, Vera Panova, Viktor Nekrasov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vladimir Voinovich among others.

“The Translator’s Doubts” singles out translation as a way of talking about literary history and theory, philosophy, and interpretation, with the work of Vladimir Nabokov as its “case study.” It is hard to separate Nabokov from the act of translation, in all senses of the word—ranging from “moving across” geographical borders and cultural and linguistic boundaries to the transferring of the split between “here” and “there” and “then” and “now.” Investigating translation as a transformational rather than mimetic experience allows us to understand the strikingly original end-result: in what emerges, both the “target language” and the “native” language undergo something new that dispenses with the quest for and the “anxiety” of influences. In this sense Nabokov constitutes a perfect object for comparativist study since his oeuvre offers us the unique opportunity to look at his major texts twice: as originals and as translations.

The symposium entitled Vekhi, or Landmarks, is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia. It was published in 1909, under the editorship of Mikhail Gershenzon, as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Landmarks contributors to exemplify and illuminate fatal philosophical, political, and psychological flaws in the revolutionary intelligentsia that had sought it. Its fame persists until today not least because the volume has been deemed by many in Russia and the West to have proven prophetic in its prediction (and urgent warning) that the realisation of the intelligentsia’s platform would bring ruin upon Russia. More than any other text, its republication in 1991 symbolically heralded the end of the ideological hegemony of Marxist-Leninism in the Soviet Union.

In addition to his numerous works in prose and poetry for both children and adults, Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), one of the founders of Russia’s “lost literature of the absurd,” wrote notebooks and a diary for most of his adult life. Published for the first time in recent years in Russian, these notebooks provide an intimate look at the daily life and struggles of one of the central figures of the literary avant-garde in Post-Revolutionary Leningrad. While Kharms’s stories have been translated and published in English, these diaries represent an invaluable source for English-language readers who, having already discovered Kharms in translation, desire to learn about the life and times of an avant-garde writer in the first decades of Soviet power.

Petersburg Winters (1928), a portrait of Petersburg drowning in the artistic ferment of late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. Georgy Ivanov is the fictional narrator of this tragic and artistically glorious period 1910-1925. Ivanov’s memoir is controversial, part of the so-called "Petersburg text", of Russian literature. The spirit of the city is conveyed through a series of vignettes of contemporary writers such as Blok, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam. Disintegration of the Atom (1937) is a prose poem depicting Russian despair in Paris on the eve of WWII. A cri de coeur that challenges our concepts of time and space and leads to erotically charged wretchedness. This exciting collection is suitable for courses on early twentieth century literary memoir and cultural history.

This book presents translations of two celebrated works by Georgy Ivanov. Disintegration of the Atom (1938) is a prose poem depicting Russian émigré despair on the eve of WWII—a cri de coeur that challenges prevailing concepts of time and space, ending in erotically charged wretchedness. Petersburg Winters (1928/1952) is a portrait of Petersburg swept up in the artistic ferment of late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. The spirit of the city is conveyed through a series of vignettes of Ivanov’s contemporaries, including Blok, Akhmatova, Esenin, and Mandelstam.

The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterises lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the post-revolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, post-industrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.

The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterises lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the post-revolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, post-industrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.

Across the twentieth century, the Russian literary hero remained central to Russian fiction and frequently “battled” one enemy or another, whether on the battlefield or on a civilian front. War was the experience of the Russian people, and it became a dominant trope to represent the Soviet experience in literature as well as other areas of cultural life. This book traces those war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in the literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Emmanuil Kazakevich, Vera Panova, Viktor Nekrasov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Voinovich, Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Makanin, Viktor Astafiev, Viktor Pelevin, and Vasily Aksyonov. These authors represented official Soviet literature and underground or dissident literature; they fell into and out of favor, were exiled and returned to Russia, died at home and abroad. Most importantly, they were all touched by war, and they reacted to the state of war in their literary works.

The Vekhi (Landmarks) symposium (1909) is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia in the period of crisis that led to the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was published as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Vekhi contributors to exemplify and illuminate fatal philosophical, political, and psychological flaws in the revolutionary intelligentsia that had sought it. Landmarks Revisited offers a new and comprehensive assessment of the symposium and its legacy from a variety of disciplinary perspectives by leading scholars in their fields. It will be of compelling interest to all students of Russian history, politics, and culture, and the impact of these on the wider world.

Using Vladimir Nabokov as its “case study,” this volume approaches translation as a crucial avenue into literary history and theory, philosophy and interpretation. The book attempts to bring together issues in translation and the shift in Nabokov studies from its earlier emphasis on the “metaliterary” to the more recent “metaphysical” approach. Addressing specific texts (both literary and cinematic), the book investigates Nabokov’s deeply ambivalent relationship to translation as a hermeneutic oscillation on his part between the relative stability of meaning, which expresses itself philosophically as a faith in the beyond, and deep metaphysical uncertainty. While Nabokov’s practice of translation changes profoundly over the course of his career, his adherence to the Romantic notion of a “true” but ultimately elusive metaphysical language remained paradoxically constant.

Manning examines the formation of nineteenth-century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of “Europe,” at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognized by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-definition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly reconquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of “strangers” of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the “strange land” of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores.

Andrei Egunov-Nikolev’s Beyond Tula is an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy world of early Soviet “production” prose, with its celebration of robust workers heroically building socialism. Combining burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical and Russian High Modernist literature with a rather tongue-in-cheek plot about the struggles of an industrializing rural proletariat, this “Soviet pastoral” actually appeared in the official press in 1931 (though it was quickly removed from circulation). As a renegade classics scholar, Egunov was aware of the expressive potential latent in so-called “light genres”—Beyond Tula is a modernist pastoral jaunt that leaves the reader with plenty to ponder.

Richard Tempest examines Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s evolution as a literary artist from his early autobiographical novel Love the Revolution to the experimental mega-saga The Red Wheel, and beyond. Tempest shows how this author gives his characters a presence so textured that we can readily imagine them as figures of flesh and blood and thought and feeling. The study discusses Solzhenitsyn’s treatment of Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian Revolution; surprising predilection for textual puzzles and games à la Nabokov or even Borges; exploration of erotic themes; and his polemical interactions with Russian and Western modernism. Also included is new information about the writer’s life and art provided by his family, as well as Tempest’s interviews with him in 2003-7.

Richard Tempest examines Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s evolution as a literary artist from his early autobiographical novel Love the Revolution to the experimental mega-saga The Red Wheel, and beyond. Tempest shows how this author gives his characters a presence so textured that we can readily imagine them as figures of flesh and blood and thought and feeling. The study discusses Solzhenitsyn’s treatment of Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian Revolution; surprising predilection for textual puzzles and games à la Nabokov or even Borges; exploration of erotic themes; and his polemical interactions with Russian and Western modernism. Also included is new information about the writer’s life and art provided by his family, as well as Tempest’s interviews with him in 2003-7.

This collection of essays on Turgenev, Goncharov, Conrad, Dos-toevsky, Blok, Briusov, Gor'kii, Pasternak and Nabokov presents a unified vision of diverse voices. Recurring themes in Masing-Delic's work include the distinction between 'culture' and 'civilisation' with Russia as the bearer of culture because it is 'barbaric'. Another deals with the synthesis of 'sense and sensibility' and the vision of 'Apollo' and 'Dionysus' creating a 'civilised culture' together. Voices that delight in the artificiality of civilisation are complemented by those apprehensive of the dangers of barbarism. Adding new perspectives to the much-debated oppo-sition of vital Russia and a declining West, Masing-Delic offers novel interpretations of classics from Oblomov to Lolito and "The Idiot" to "Doctor Zhivago".

The Twentieth Century Russian Short Story: A Critical Companion is a collection of the most informative critical articles on some of the best twentieth-century Russian short stories from Chekhov and Bunin to Tolstaya and Pelevin. While each article focuses on a particular short story, collectively they elucidate the developments in each author’s oeuvre and in the subjects, structure, and themes of the twentieth-century Russian short story. American, European and Russian scholars discuss the recurrent themes of language’s power and limits, of childhood and old age, of art and sexuality, and of cultural, individual and artistic memory. The book opens with a discussion of the short story genre and its socio-cultural function. This book will be of value to all scholars of Russian literature, the short story, and genre theory.

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 “cultural idioms” as Ostap Bender, Buratino, Vasilii Tyorkin, Shtirlitz, and others. The steadily increasing charisma of Soviet tricksters from the 1920s to the 2000s is indicative of at least two fundamental features of both the soviet and post-soviet societies. First, tricksters reflect the constant presence of irresolvable contradictions and yawning gaps within the soviet (as well as post-soviet) social universe. Secondly, these characters epitomize the realm of cynical culture thus far unrecognized in Russian studies. Soviet tricksters present survival in a cynical, contradictory and inadequate world, not as a necessity, but as a field for creativity, play, and freedom. Through an analysis of the representation of tricksters in soviet and post-soviet culture, Lipovetsky attempts to draw a virtual map of the soviet and post-soviet cynical reason: to identify its symbols, discourses, contradictions, and by these means its historical development from the 1920s to the 2000s.

The Twentieth Century Russian Short Story: A Critical Companion is a collection of the most informative critical articles on some of the best twentieth-century Russian short stories from Chekhov and Bunin to Tolstaya and Pelevin. While each article focuses on a particular short story, collectively they elucidate the developments in each author’s oeuvre and in the subjects, structure, and themes of the twentieth-century Russian short story. American, European and Russian scholars discuss the recurrent themes of language’s power and limits, of childhood and old age, of art and sexuality, and of cultural, individual and artistic memory. The book opens with a discussion of the short story genre and its socio-cultural function. This book will be of value to all scholars of Russian literature, the short story, and genre theory.

Manning examines the formation of nineteenth century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of “Europe,” at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognised by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-definition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly re-conquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of ‘strangers’ of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the ‘strange land’ of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores.