Studies of the Harriman Institute – serie

The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature studies the development of the Cossack hero and identifies him as part of Russian cultural mythology. Judith Kornblatt explores the power of the myth as a literary image, providing new and challenging readings of 19th- and 20th-century works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi, Khlebnikov, Babel, Tsvetaeva, Sholokhov and a number of lesser-known writers, all of whom were attracted to the Cossack. By comparing the Cossack with the American cowboy, she reveals what is both unique and universal about the Russian self-image. Grappling with the phenomenon of myth-formation Kornblatt places the Cossack hero in historical and sociopolitical context, chronicling the growth of the Cossack myth of unbounded wholeness and life, its gradually increasing influence on the Russian national consciousness during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and its eventual demise under the strictures of Stalinist socialist realism. Kornblatt's eclectic methodology draws upon Barthes, White, Turner and other Western theorists as well as upon such leading Russian critics and philosophers of language as Bakhtin, Lotman and Uspensky.

Using archival materials never previously accessible to Western scholars, Michael David-Fox analyzes Bolshevik Party educational and research initiatives in higher learning after 1917. His fresh consideration of the era of the New Economic Policy and cultural politics after the Revolution explains how new communist institutions rose to parallel and rival conventional higher learning from the Academy of Sciences to the universities. Beginning with the creation of the first party school by intellectuals on the island of Capri in 1909, David-Fox argues, the Bolshevik cultural project was tightly linked to party educational institutions. He provides the first account of the early history and politics of three major institutions founded after the Revolution: Sverdlov Communist University, where the quest to transform everyday life gripped the student movement; the Institute of Red Professors, where the Bolsheviks sought to train a new communist intellectual or red specialist; and the Communist Academy, headquarters for a planned, collectivist, proletarian science.

In this richly comparative analysis of late Muscovite and early Imperial court culture, Ernest A. Zitser provides a corrective to the secular bias of the scholarly literature about the reforms of Peter the Great. Zitser demonstrates that the tsar's supposedly "secularizing" reforms rested on a fundamentally religious conception of his personal political mission. In particular, Zitser shows that the carnivalesque (and often obscene) activities of the so-called Most Comical All-Drunken Council served as a type of Baroque political sacrament—a monarchical rite of power that elevated the tsar's person above normal men, guaranteed his prerogative over church affairs, and bound the participants into a community of believers in his God-given authority ("charisma"). The author suggests that by implicating Peter's "royal priesthood" in taboo-breaking, libertine ceremonies, the organizers of such "sacred parodies" inducted select members of the Russian political elite into a new system of distinctions between nobility and baseness, sacrality and profanity, tradition and modernity.Tracing the ways in which the tsar and his courtiers appropriated aspects of Muscovite and European traditions to suit their needs and aspirations, The Transfigured Kingdom offers one of the first discussions of the gendered nature of political power at the court of Russia's self-proclaimed "Father of the Fatherland" and reveals the role of symbolism, myth, and ritual in shaping political order in early modern Europe.

For the past 150 years, critics have referred to 'the Gogol problem', by which they mean their inability to account for a life and work that are puzzling, often opaque, yet have proved consistently fascinating to generations of readers. This book proceeds on the assumption that Gogol's life and work, in all their manifestations, form a whole; it identifies, in ways that have eluded critics to date, the rhetorical strategies and thematic patterns that create the unity. These larger concerns emerge from a close study of the major texts, fictional and nonfictional, and in turn are set in a broad artistic and intellectual context, Russian and European, with special attention to German philosophy, the visual arts, and Orthodox Christian theology.