Middlebury Studies in Russian Language and Literature – serie

Between 1821 and 1891, the Optina Pustyn Monastery of Konzel'sk, in Russia's Kaluga Government, was the site of an unprecedented - and as yet unequaled - period of religious and literary flowering. Optina Pustyn was a mecca for many of Russia's most prominent writers and thinkers. Distinguished visitors included Ivan Kireevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy. This study explains why Optina and its renowned «elders» held a special attraction to Russia's literary giants. It reveals how the elders' use of language was rooted in the «iconic vision» of Optina's fifteen-hundred-year-old tradition of contemplative monasticism. It is the first study to examine Optina's social gravity against the broad background of nineteenth-century institutions of Church and Intelligentsia.

Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe is a collection of articles discussing authors whose homelands range from the former Soviet Union to the former Yugoslavia. For the purposes of this book, East and Central Europe comprise Russia, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Romania, and former Yugoslavia.These writers were exiled as a result of unbearable political climates – be it nations of the Communist block, including former Yugoslavia torn by its civil wars, or in the case of Poland, its partitioning by neighboring powers in the nineteenth century. No other book has collected such a variety of discussions from this geopolitical region, featuring authors who chose exile over the extinguishment of their individuality. Organized by theme and geography, this book will be of interest to a wide group of readers: from the topic of exile to research in Slavic (Czech, Polish, Russian, and post-Yugoslav), Romanian, German, and comparative literature. Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe is a valuable supplement to courses in Eastern and Central European history, as well as a primary text for courses in East and Central European literature.

«Dew on the Grass»: The Poetics of Inbetweenness in Chekhov is the first comprehensive and systematic study to focus on the poetic dimensions of Anton Chekhov’s prose and drama. Using the concept of «inbetweenness», this book reconceptualizes the central aspects of Chekhov’s style, from his use of language to the origins of his artistic worldview. Radislav Lapushin offers a fresh interpretive framework for the analysis of Chekhov’s individual works and his œuvre as a whole.