Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics – serie

Russia is an enigmatic, mysterious country, situated between East and West not only spatially, but also mentally. Or so it is traditionally perceived in Western Europe and the Anglophone world at large. One of the distinctive features of Russian culture is its irrationalism, which revealed itself diversely in Russian life and thought, literature, music and visual arts, and has survived to the present day. Bridging the gap in existing scholarship, the current volume is an attempt at an integral and multifaceted approach to this phenomenon, and launches the study of Russian irrationalism in philosophy, theology, literature and the arts of the last two hundred years, together with its reflections in Russian reality. Contributors: Tatiana Chumakova, David Gillespie, Arkadii Goldenberg, Kira Gordovich, Rainer Grübel, Elizabeth Harrison, Jeremy Howard, Aleksandr Ivashkin, Elena Kabkova, Sergei Kibalnik, Oleg Kovalov, Alexander McCabe, Barbara Olaszek, Oliver Ready, Oliver Smith, Margarita Odesskaia, Ildikó Mária Rácz, Lyudmila Safronova, Marilyn Schwinn Smith, Henrieke Stahl, Olga Stukalova, Olga Tabachnikova, Christopher John Tooke, and Natalia Vinokurova.

Editors Robert Reid and Joe Andrew present eleven contributions by international scholars which highlight Tolstoi’s influence on his contemporaries and posterity through his fiction and thought. A figure of Tolstoi’s intellectual stature has naturally inspired an impressive range of responses. These encompass stage versions of his novels (War and Peace and Resurrection), communes founded in his name, and translations which have sought to capture the essence of his works for successive generations. Tolstoi is also compared in this volume with his contemporaries in chapters on Dostoevskii, Veselitsakaia, Rozanov and Elizabeth Gaskell. The reader of this work will gain new and unique insights into an unparalleled genius of world literature, especially into his immense cultural reach which continues to this day.Contributors: Carol Apollonio, Katherine Jane Briggs, Elena Govor, Nel Grillaert, Susan Layton, Cynthia Marsh, Henrietta Mondry, Richard Peace, Alexandra Smith, Olga Sobolev, Willem Weststeijn, Kevin Windle.

Between the Thaw and the Prague Spring, Socialist Europe experienced a brief yet intense period of intellectual ferment. Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956-1968 explores the shifting landscape of literature, philosophy, literary theory, and political thought in the wake of Stalinism and on the cusp of postmodernism. Bridging cultural analysis and intellectual history, this volume offers fresh insights into a period that shaped Socialist Europe for decades.

This book is the first to deal with documentary aesthetic practices of the post-war period in Eastern Europe in a comparative perspective. The contributions examine the specific forms and modes of documentary representations and the role they played in the formation of new aesthetic trends during the cultural-political transition of the long 1960s. This documentary first-hand approach to the world aimed to break up unquestioned ideological structures and expose tabooed truths in order to engender much-needed social changes. New ways of depicting daily life, writing testimony or subjective reportage emerged that still shape cultural debates today.

This volume is a major contribution to the study of the life, work and standing of Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Nobel Prize Laureate and the best-known Russian poet of the second half of the twentieth century. This is the most significant book devoted to him in the last 25 years, and features work by many of the leading experts on him, both in Russia and the West. Every one of the chapters makes a real contribution to different aspects of Brodsky – the growth of interest in his work, his world view and political position, and the unique aspects of his poetics. Taken together, the sixteen chapters offer a rounded interpretation of his significance for Russian culture today.

This book presents the first edition of Polish and Latin works by Stefan Javors’kyj (1658–1722), the leading author of Ukrainian literature of his time. The book contains four panegyrics dedicated to the Ukrainian political and ecclesiastical leaders, Hetman Ivan Mazepa and Metropolitan Barlaam Jasyns’kyj. In his masterful books, Javors’kyj combines emblems, lyric and epic poetry with prose in two languages. The edition will help to bring Ukrainian texts into the canon of early modern European literature and to recover an important fragment of literary history.Edited by Jakub Niedźwiedź and Bartosz B. Awianowiczwith an introduction by Jakub Niedźwiedź

This edition presents a selection of 15 sermons by Stefan Javors’kyj (1658–1722), a Ukrainian poet and preacher of the late 17th century. His imagination, knowledge, and rhetorical skills made him one of the leading European writers of his time. For political reasons, his sermons remained in manuscript for over 300 years. The editors have painstakingly transcribed the Ukrainian texts and annotated them in English. The edition makes Javors’kyj’s works available to scholars who wish to broaden their knowledge of an unknown part of early modern European literature.Edited by Giovanna Brogi, Maksym Yaremenko, Tetiana Kuzyk, Marzanna Kuczyńska, and Jakub Niedźwiedźwith an introduction by Marzanna Kuczyńska in collaboration with Bartosz B. Awianowicz, Grzegorz Franczak, and Monika Miazek-Męczyńska

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), author of such bestselling novels as Lolita and Pale Fire, was also an extraordinarily prolific poet, a poetry translator, and a self- translator. Yet, the intersection of these activities – Nabokov’s endeavour as a self- translator of poetry – remains largely unexplored to this day. This book represents the very first exhaustive analysis of the poems Nabokov self-translated for his novels, short stories, and poetry collections. The results of this study shed completely new light on Nabokov’s lifelong involvement with poetry and its translation by introducing self-translated poetry as an interlingual poetic space where the intricate connections between poetry, memory, and bilingualism can be solved.

The Overcoming of History in “War and Peace” marks a radical departure from the critical tradition dominated by Sir Isaiah Berlin’s view that the novel is deeply divided against itself, a majestically flawed contest of brilliant art and clumsy thought. To the contrary, Jeff Love argues that the apparently divided nature of the text, its multi-leveled negotiation between different kinds of representation, expresses the rich variety of the novel’s very deliberate striving to capture the fluidity of change and becoming in the fixed forms of language. The inevitable failure of this striving, revealing the irreducible conflict between infinite desire and finite capacity, is at once the source of new beginnings and the repetition of old ones, a wellspring of continually renewed promises to achieve a synoptic vision of the whole that the novel cannot fulfill. This repetitive struggle between essentially comic and tragic conceptions of human action, far from being a pervasive flaw in the texture of the novel, in fact constitutes its dynamic center and principal trope as well as the productive origin of the unusual features that distinguish it as an uncommonly bold narrative experiment.

Breaking Ground examines travel writing’s contribution to the development of a Russian national culture from roughly 1700 to 1850, as Russia struggled to define itself against Western Europe. Russian examples of literary travel writing began with imitative descriptions of grand tours abroad, but progressive familiarity with the West and with its literary forms gradually enabled writers to find other ways of describing the experiences of Russians en route. Blending foreign and native cultural influences, writers responded to the pressures of the age—to Catherine II, Napoleon, and Nicholas I, for example—both by turning “inward” to focus on domestic touring and by rewriting their relationship to the West. This book tracks the evolution of literary travel writing in this period of its unprecedented popularity and demonstrates how the expression of national identity, the discovery of a national culture, and conceptions of place—both Russian and Western European-were among its primary achievements. These elements also constitute travel writing’s chief legacy to prose fiction, “breaking ground” for the later masterpieces of writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. For literary scholars, historians, and other educated readers with interests in Russian culture, travel writing, comparative literature, and national identity.

Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin’s legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights. Pushkin is shown to be a Russian forerunner of Baudelaire. Furthermore it is argued that the rise of the Russian and European novel largely changed the ways Russian poets have looked at themselves and at poetic language; that novelisation of poetry is detectable in the major works of poetry that engaged in a creative dialogue with Pushkin, and that polyphonic lyric has been achieved. Alexandra Smith locates significant examples of Pushkin’s cinematographic cognition of reality, suggesting that such dynamic descriptions of Petersburg helped create a highly original animated image of the city as comic apocalypse, which followers of Pushkin appropriated very successfully even as far as the late twentieth century. Montaging Pushkin will be of interest to all students of Russian poetry, as well as specialists in literary theory, European studies and the history of ideas.

The present volume has as its primary aim readings, from a feminist perspective, of a number of works from Russian literature published over the period in which the ‘woman question’ rose to the fore and reached its peak. All the works considered here were produced in, or hark back to, a fairly narrowly defined period of not quite 20 years (1846-1864) in which issues of gender, of male and female roles were discussed much more keenly than in perhaps any other period in Russian literature.The overall project is summed up by the three key words of this book’s title, narrative, space and gender, and, especially, the interconnections between them. That is, what do the way these stories were told tell us about gender identities in mid-nineteenth-century Russia? Which spaces were central to these fictional worlds? Which spaces suggested which gender identities? The discussions therefore focus on issues of narrative and space, and how they acted as ‘technologies of gender’.This volume will be of interest to all interested in nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as students of gender, and of the semiotics of narrative space.

For poets throughout the world Rome was the world. This is particularly true for Russian poets, owing to the anagrammatical relation of the words Rome and mir (Rome and world). The legacy of ancient Rome has always constituted an important component of the Russian cultural consciousness. The revitalization of classical scholarship in nineteenth-century Russia and new approaches to antiquity prompted many of the Russian Symbolists to seek their inspiration in ancient Rome. Vladimir Solovyov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Valery Bryusov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Maksimilian Voloshin, Vasily Komarovsky, and Mikhail Kuzmin all made significant contributions to what is often referred to as the “Roman text.”The Legacy of Ancient Rome in the Russian Silver Age analyzes the forms involved in creating the Roman image and explores its functionality within the given poetic system. In addition to the formal analysis, the background and the stimulus leading up to the composition of a particular poem are explored, as well as allusions to legends, myths and Rome’s geography and architecture. Moreover, this study considers the function of the Roman text in Russian Symbolist poetics and the works of the individual poets. Finally, the relation between the Roman and Petersburg texts of Russian literature is explored, since many of the Russian Symbolist poets found in Rome a perfect metaphor for their studies of the city and “urban” poetry.

The present volume has as its central aim a reassessment of the works of Ivan Turgenev for the twenty-first century. Against the background of a decline in interest in nineteenth-century literature the articles gathered here seek to argue that the period in general, and his work in particular, still have much to offer the modern sensibility. The volume also offers a great variety of approaches. Some of the contributors tackle major works by Turgenev, including Rudin and Smoke, while others address key themes that run through all his creative work. Yet others address his influence, as well as his broader relationship with Russian and other cultures. A final group of articles examines other key figures in Russian literary culture, including Belinskii, Herzen and Tolstoi. The work will therefore be of interest to students, postgraduates and specialists in the field of Russian literary culture. At the same time, they will stand as a tribute to the life and work of Professor Richard Peace, a long-standing specialist in nineteenth-century Russian literature, in whose honour the volume has been compiled.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, a large and varied group of the Russian intelligentsia became fascinated by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose provocative ideas inspired many of them to overcome obsolete traditions and to create new values. Paradoxically, the German philosopher, who vigorously challenged the established Christian worldview, invigorated the rich ferment of religious philosophy in the Russian Silver Age: his ideas served as a fruitful source of inspiration for the philosophers of the Russian religious renaissance, the so-called God-seekers, in their quest for a new religious consciousness. Especially Nietzsche’s anthropology of the Übermensch was instrumental in their reformulation of Christianity. This book explores how three pivotal figures in the Russian religious reception of Nietzsche, i.e. Vladimir Solov’ëv, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Nikolai Berdiaev, engaged in a vacillating yet highly prolific debate with Nietzsche and how each of them appropriated his anthropology of the Übermensch in their religious philosophy. In order to explain Merezhkovskii’s and Berdiaev’s assessment of Nietzsche, the author highlights the significance of Dostoevskii: only by reading Nietzsche through the prism of Dostoevskii could both God-seekers pin down the religious ramifications of Nietzsche’s thought. This book will be of interest to anyone fascinated by Nietzsche, Dostoevskii, Russian religious philosophy, Russian history of ideas and reception studies.

In this volume of SSLP the contributions of Dutch scholars working in the field of Slavic literature and culture to the 14th International Congress of Slavists (Ohrid, Macedonia, September 10–16, 2008) are brought together. All of them except one (on the Polish poet Cyprian Norwid’s story Stigma), deal with Russian literature from the end of the 18th century up to recent years. A variety of topics is treated, such as the feminization of Russian literature, the reflection of poetry in prose, anthropological and religious dimensions of literature, the specifics of theme and of plot, Russian modernism and postmodernism, and the status of language, from different methodological angles: gender studies, structural analysis, philosophical-contextual, postcolonial. Works of such Russian authors as Ippolit Bogdanovich, Ivan Turgenev, Pavel Mel’nikov-Pecherskii, Ignatii Potapenko, Iurii Trifonov, Timur Kibirov and Viktor Pelevin are discussed in detail. This volume is of interest for a scholarly audience interested in Russian literature of the last 250 years.

Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment presents for the first time an examination of this great novel as a work aimed at winning back “target readers”, young contemporary radicals, from Utilitarianism, nihilism, and Utopian Socialism. Dostoevsky framed the battle in the context of the Orthodox Church and oral tradition versus the West. He relied on knowledge of the Gospels as text received orally, forcing readers to react emotionally, not rationally, and thus undermining the very basis of his opponents’ arguments. Dostoevsky saves Raskol’nikov, underscoring the inadequacy of rational thought and reminding his readers of a heritage discarded at their peril. This volume should be of special interest to secondary and university students, as well as to readers interested in literature, particularly, in Russian literature, and Dostoevsky.

The domestic theme has a tremendous anthropological, literary and cultural significance. The purpose of this book is to analyse and interpret the most important realisations and tendencies of this thematic complex in the history of Russian literature. It is the first systematic book-length exploration of the meaning and development of the House theme in Russian literature of the past 200 years. It studies the ideological, psychological and moral meanings which Russian cultural and literary tradition have invested in the house or projected on it in literary texts. Central to this study’s approach is the concept of the House Myth, consisting of a set of basic fabular elements and a set of general types of House images. This House Myth provides the general point of reference from which the literary works were analyzed and compared. With the help of this analytical procedure characteristics of individual authors could be described as well as recurrent patterns and features discerned in the way Russian literature dealt with the House and its thematics, thus reflecting characteristics of Russian literary world pictures, Russian mentalities and Russian attitudes towards life. This book is of interest for students of Russian literature as well as for those interested in the House as a cultural and literary topic, in the semiotics of literature, and in relations between culture, anthropology and literature.

Whatever critical scalpel one selects for dissecting the literary works of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), there will always be a certain degree of textual resistance which cannot be broken. Or in other words, taking off one of Schulz’s many masks, one will probably never avoid the impression that a new mask has emerged. This book contributes to the three most typical critical strategies of reading Schulz’s works (combinations, fragmentations, reintegrations) – being fully aware, of course, of the relativity of each particular approach. In addition, the book sets out to explore all of Schulz’s creative output (i.e. his stories as well as his graphic, epistolary and even literary critical works), as one of Schulz’s main goals was exactly to cross artificially set up boundaries between, among other things, different artistic media of expression. The book for the first time brings together leading Schulzologists (Jarzębski, Robertson, Sproede) and their prospective successors (Augsburger, Gorin, Kato, Suchańska-Drażyńska, Underhill, Wojda), established Polish academics (Dąbrowski, Markowski, Skwara, Weretiuk) and their foreign counterparts (De Bruyn, Gall, Meyer-Fraatz, Schulte, Zieliński), scholars primarily working on other authors (Anessi, Śliwa, Żurek) and those focusing on other art forms (Sánchez-Pardo, Watt). The editors’ introduction offers an overview of seven decades of Schulzology. The book is of interest for both readers with a general interest in (world) literature and/or a particular interest in Polish and Jewish studies.

Exiles cross borders, become non-mainstream individuals and break through barriers of thought and experience. Forced or chosen detachment can lead to originality of vision, awareness of simultaneous dimensions – in short a writing that challenges boundaries of genre, monolingualism and national literatures.The writers of the Balkan (Slavic) diaspora offer narratives of critical reflection, strange fusions and unions, representative of the new cultural identities of contemporary Europe.This volume presents an interesting combination of original writer’s essays (by Tzveta Sofronieva, Goran Stefanovski, Dubravka Ugresic) and academic discussions on the function of such narratives, seeking answers to a number of academic questions, related to the construction of the Self in processes of cultural translation/transmission.

Turgenev is in many ways the most enigmatic of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers. A realist, he was nevertheless drawn towards symbolism and the supernatural in his later career. Renowned for his authentic depictions of Russian life, he spent long periods in Europe and was more Western in outlook than many of his contemporaries. Though he stood aloof from politics, the major political issues of nineteenth-century Russia are central to his fiction. Interest in Turgenev remains strong in the twenty-first century, sustained by the amenability of his work to contemporary critical approaches and also by a recognition of the continuing relevance of his perspective on the perennial complexities of Russia’s relations with Europe. This volume provides ample evidence of this interest. The chapters which comprise it are written by specialists on the writer and cover many aspects of Turgenev’s creativity from his artistic method to such issues as the Jewish Question and Europe. It also examines his cultural legacy - in film and recent popular re-writes of his novels - as well as his influence on writers as diverse as Rozanov and Robert Dessaix. This work will be of interest to students, postgraduates and specialists in the field of Russian literary culture.

Perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century Russian writer, Dostoevskii’s continuing popularity rests on his contemporary relevance. The prophetic streak in his creativity gives him the same lasting appeal as dystopian novelists such as Zamiatin and Orwell whom he influenced and whose ethical concerns he anticipated. Religious themes are prominent in his work, too, and, though he was a believer, his interest seems to lie in the tension between faith and unbelief, which was felt as keenly in the Russia of his time as in our own. The nature of Dostoevskii’s art also continues to be debated. The older tendency to disparage his literary method has given way to a recognition of the originality of his techniques, without which his ideological concerns would not have emerged with such thought-provoking clarity. The chapters which comprise this volume address these issues in a range of Dostoevskii’s works, from shorter classics, such as House of the Dead and Notes from Underground to great novels such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. This work will be of use to scholars and students of Dostoevskii at all levels as well as to those with an interest in nineteenth-century literature more generally.

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of the representation of dogs in Russian discourse since the nineteenth century. Focusing on the correlation between humans and dogs in traditional belief systems, in literature, film and other cultural productions, it shows that the dog as a political construct incorporates various contradictions, with different representations investing the dog with multiple, often-paradoxical meanings – moral, social and philosophical. From the peasantry’s dislike of the gentry’s hunting dogs and children’s cruelty to dogs in Pushkin and Dostoevsky to the establishment of the Soviet dynasties of border guard and police dogs, from Pavlov’s laboratory dogs to the monuments to the cosmic dog Laika and the subversive dog impersonations by the contemporary performance artist Oleg Kulik, the book explores the intersections of species-class-gender-sexuality-race-disability and, paradoxically, of Arcadian and Utopian dreams and scientific deeds. This study contributes to the unfolding cultural history of human-animal relations across cultures.