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The first generation of Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety resulting from the belief that they were living in an age of decline. What made them unique was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death both by metaphysical and physical means. They intertwined their mystical erotic discourse with European degeneration theory and its obsession with the destabilization of gender. In Erotic Utopia , Olga Matich suggests that same-sex desire underlay their most radical utopian proposal of abolishing the traditional procreative family in favor of erotically induced abstinence. 2006 Winner, CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Titles, Current Reviews for Academic Libraries Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association “Offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of new information on early Russian modernism. . . . It is required reading for anyone interested in fin-de-siècle Russia and in the history of sexuality in general.”—Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Slavic and East European Journal “Thoroughly entertaining.”—Avril Pyman, Slavic Review

Where Currents Meet treats the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in Ukraine’s East as elements of a complex continuum. This study of cultural memory in post-Soviet space shows how its inhabitants negotiate the historical legacy they have inherited. Tanya Zaharchenko approaches contemporary Ukrainian literature at the intersection of memory studies and border studies, and her analysis adds a new voice to an ongoing exploration of cultural and historical discourses in Ukraine. This scholarly journey through storylines explores the ways in which younger writers in Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian), a diverse, dynamic, but understudied border city in east Ukraine today come to grips with a traumatized post-Soviet cultural landscape. Zaharchenko’s book examines the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andrei Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev and others, introducing them as a “doubletake\" generation who came of age during the Soviet Union’s collapse and as adults revisited this experience in their novels. Filling the space between society and the state, local literary texts have turned into forms of historical memory and agents of political life.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Soviet philologist, literary dissident, and university professor Viktor Duvakin made it his mission to interview the members of the artistic avant-garde who had survived the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s purges, and the Second World War. Based on archival materials held at the Moscow State University Library, Russian Modernism in the Memories of the Survivors catalogues six interviews conducted by Duvakin. The interviewees talk about their most intimate life experiences and give personal accounts of their interactions with famous writers and artists such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Marina Tsvetaeva. They offer insights into the world of Russian emigrants in Prague and Paris, the uprising against the Communist government, what it was like to work at the United Nations after the Second World War, and other important aspects of life in the Soviet Union and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Archival photographs, as well as hundreds of annotations to the text, are included to help readers understand the historical and cultural context of the interviews. The unique and previously unpublished materials in Russian Modernism in the Memories of the Survivors will be of great interest to anyone who wants to learn more about this fascinating period in Soviet history.

After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history, despite the central role he had played in the cultural life of Russia’s northern capital for nearly twenty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writings have gradually been rediscovered in Russia, but with his archives scattered between Russia, France, and the USA, the project of reconstructing the story of his life has been a complex task. This book, the first full biography of Zamiatin in any language, draws upon his extensive correspondence and other documents in order to provide an account of his life which explores his intimate preoccupations, as well as uncovering the political and cultural background to many of his works. It reveals a man of strong will and high principles, who negotiated the political dilemmas of his day—including his relationship with Stalin—with great shrewdness.

In Women Writing on the French Riviera Rosemary Lancaster examines the varied literary and artistic works of nine women visitors and their unique contributions to the cultural identity of the Riviera in its seminal rise to fame.

Here is an enlightening, nuanced, and accessible introduction to the life and work of one of the greatest writers of short fiction in history. Anton Chekhov's stories and plays endure, far beyond the Russian context, as outstanding modern literary models. In a brief, remarkable life, Chekhov rose from lower-class, provincial roots to become a physician, leading writer, and philanthropist, all in the face of a progressive fatal disease. In this biography, Michael C. Finke analyzes Chekhov's major stories, plays, and nonfiction in the context of his life, both fleshing out the key features of Chekhov's poetics of prose and drama and revealing key continuities across genres, as well as between his lesser-studied early writings and the later works.

Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York examines the myth of America as the Other World at the moment of transition from the Russian to the Soviet version. The material on which Milla Fedorova bases her study comprises a curious phenomenon of the waning nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—pilgrimages to America by prominent Russian writers who then created travelogues. The writers' missions usually consisted of two parts: the physical journey, which most of the writers considered as ideologically significant, and the literary fruit of the pilgrimages. Until now, the American travelogue has not been recognized and studied as a particular kind of narration with its own canons. Arguing that the primary cultural model for Russian writers' journey to America is Dante's descent into Hell, Federova ultimately reveals how America is represented as the country of \"dead souls\" where objects and machines have exchanged places with people, where relations between the living and the dead are inverted.

The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905-1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article \"The Hell of Treblinka\" became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman's powerful anti-totalitarian works liken the Nazis' crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of great art. Because Grossman's major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff's authoritative biography illuminates Grossman's life and legacy.

This book presents the lives and works of eleven Jewish women authors who lived in the Soviet Union, and who wrote and published their works in Russian. The works include poems, novels, memoirs and other writing. The book provides an overview of the life of each author, an overview of each author's literary output, and an assessment of each author's often conflicted view of her \"feminine self\" and of her \"Jewish self\". At a time when the large Jewish population which lived within the Soviet Union was threatened under Stalin's prosecutions the book provides highly-informative insights into what it was like to be a Jewish woman in the Soviet Union in this period. The writers presented are: Alexandra Brustein, Elizaveta Polonskaia, Raisa Bloch, Hanna Levina, Ol'ga Ziv, Yulia Neiman, Rahil' Baumwohl', Margarita Alliger, Sarah Levina-Kul'neva, Sarah Pogreb and Zinaida Mirkina.

Russian Nobel prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures-and perhaps the most important writer-of the last century. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, the first English translation of his memoir of the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 1 , is being published. Fast-paced, absorbing, and as compelling as the earlier installments of his memoir The Oak and the Calf (1975), Between Two Millstones begins on February 13, 1974, when Solzhenitsyn found himself forcibly expelled to Frankfurt, West Germany, as a result of the publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago . Solzhenitsyn moved to Zurich, Switzerland, for a time and was considered the most famous man in the world, hounded by journalists and reporters. During this period, he found himself untethered and unable to work while he tried to acclimate to his new surroundings. Between Two Millstones contains vivid descriptions of Solzhenitsyn's journeys to various European countries and North American locales, where he and his wife Natalia (\"Alya\") searched for a location to settle their young family. There are fascinating descriptions of one-on-one meetings with prominent individuals, detailed accounts of public speeches such as the 1978 Harvard University commencement, comments on his television appearances, accounts of his struggles with unscrupulous publishers and agents who mishandled the Western editions of his books, and the KGB disinformation efforts to besmirch his name. There are also passages on Solzhenitsyn's family and their property in Cavendish, Vermont, whose forested hillsides and harsh winters evoked his Russian homeland, and where he could finally work undisturbed on his ten-volume dramatized history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel . Stories include the efforts made to assure a proper education for the writer's three sons, their desire to return one day to their home in Russia, and descriptions of his extraordinary wife, editor, literary advisor, and director of the Russian Social Fund, Alya, who successfully arranged, at great peril to herself and to her family, to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's invaluable archive out of the Soviet Union. Between Two Millstones is a literary event of the first magnitude. The book dramatically reflects the pain of Solzhenitsyn's separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western society.