Explore the vast range of titles available.

How Russian Literature Became Great explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating far beyond Russia's borders. Rolf Hellebust investigates a range of literary tendencies, philosophies, and theories from antiquity to the present: Roman jurisprudence to German Romanticism, French Enlightenment to Czech Structuralism, Herder to Hobsbawm, Samuel Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, and so on. Besides the usual Russian suspects from Pushkin to Chekhov, Hellebust includes European writers: Byron and Shelley, Goethe and Schiller, Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, Dante, Mickiewicz, and more. As elsewhere, writing in Russia advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments constituting an atemporal \"ideal order among themselves\" (T.S. Eliot). And yet this is a tradition that could only have been born at a specific moment in the golden nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building. The Russian example reveals the contradictions between immutability and innovation, universality and specificity at the heart of modern conceptions of tradition from Sainte-Beuve through Eliot and down to the present day. The conditions of its era of formation-the prominence of the crucial literary-historical question of the writer's social function, and the equation of literature with national identity-make the Russian classical tradition the epitome of a unified cultural text, with a complex narrative in which competing stories of progress and decline unfold through the symbolic biographical encounters of the authors who constitute its members. How Russian Literature Became Great thus offers a new paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.

Work Flows investigates the emergence of \"flow\" as a crucial metaphor within Russian labor culture since 1870. Maya Vinokour frames concern with fluid channeling as immanent to vertical power structures-whether that verticality derives from the state, as in Stalin's Soviet Union and present-day Russia, or from the proliferation of corporate monopolies, as in the contemporary Anglo-American West. Originating in pre-revolutionary bio-utopianism, the Russian rhetoric of liquids and flow reached an apotheosis during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan and re-emerged in post-Soviet \"managed democracy\" and Western neoliberalism. The literary, philosophical, and official texts that Work Flows examines give voice to the Stalinist ambition of reforging not merely individual bodies, but space and time themselves. By mobilizing the understudied thematic of fluidity, Vinokour offers insight into the nexus of philosophy, literature, and science that underpinned Stalinism and remains influential today. Work Flows demonstrates that Stalinism is not a historical phenomenon restricted to the period 1922-1953, but a symptom of modernity as it emerged in the twentieth century. Stalinism's legacy extends far beyond the bounds of the former Soviet Union, emerging in seemingly disparate settings like post-Soviet Russia and Silicon Valley.

I Try Not to Think of Afghanistan includes photographs and commentaries from Lithuanian veterans of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979–89), addressing the lasting realities of war and its effects on those conscripted to fight. Unflinching first-person accounts give details of training, combat, and the often difficult return to society for military conscripts within the Soviet system. Anna Reich gives insight into the experiences of not only the Lithuanian veterans from the Soviet War in Afghanistan but also veterans from all countries who face similar struggles and challenges. For three months, Reich interacted with twenty-two veterans in their homes and meeting halls and throughout their daily routines to produce portraits that provide intimate and unvarnished portrayals of their lives and the lasting effects of forced military service in the Soviet army. Often ostracized socially because of their involvement with the Soviet army, the veterans frequently feel invisible: there are no social programs to assist them in their attempts to address post-traumatic stress disorder and assimilate into society, their cause is largely unknown, and the government responsible for their conscriptions no longer exists. I Try Not to Think of Afghanistan is the culmination of eight years of investigation into the psychological toll of war and trauma. In providing a rarely seen perspective of life after combat, the book intersects with contemporary discourse, specifically the way the US experience in Afghanistan closely mirrors that of the Soviets and the Russian Federation's forced conscription of young men to fight in Ukraine.

Cosmopolitan Spaces in Odesa: A Case Study of an Urban Context is the first book to explore Odesa’s cosmopolitan spaces in an urban context from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Leading scholars shed new light on encounters between Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian cultures. They debate different understandings of cosmopolitanism as they are reflected in Odesa’s rich multilingual culture, ranging from intellectual history and education to music, opera, and literature. The issues of language and interethnic tensions, imperialist repression, and language choice are still with us today. Moreover, the book affords a historical view of what lay behind the Odesa myth, as well as insights into the Jewish and Ukrainian cultural revivals of the early twentieth century.

This is the first volume to consistently examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives: intellectual history, literary history and theory, comparative literature, translation studies, diaspora studies. Its emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet attention to world literature; as such, the present volume makes a significant contribution to current debates on world literature beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies and foregrounds the need to think of world literature pluralistically, in a manner that is not restricted by the agendas of Anglophone academe.

Reflections on Stalinism distills decades of historical thought and research, bringing together twelve senior scholars of Soviet history who began their careers during the Cold War to examine their views of Stalinism. They present insights into the role of personality in statecraft, the social underpinnings of dictatorship and state terrorism, historians' attachments to their subjects, historical causality, the applicability of Marxist categories to Soviet history, the relationship of Soviet history to post-Soviet Russia, and more. Essays address the transformation of a peasant country into a superpower and the causes and scale of domestic bloodshed. Reflections on Stalinism ultimately tackles an age-old question: Do powerful people make history or are they the product of it?

Stalin's Final Films explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema. Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results. Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.

Located within the forgotten half of Europe, historically trapped between Germany and Russia, Estonia has been profoundly shaped by the violent conflicts and shifting political fortunes of the last century. This innovative study traces the tangled interaction of Estonian historical memory and national identity in a sweeping analysis extending from the Great War to the present day. At its heart is the enduring anguish of World War Two and the subsequent half-century of Soviet rule. Shadowlands tells this story by foregrounding the experiences of the country's intellectuals, who were instrumental in sustaining Estonian historical memory, but who until fairly recently could not openly grapple with their nation's complex, difficult past.

Combining burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical literature with a tongue-in-cheek plot about an industrializing rural proletariat, Beyond Tula--subtitled \"a Soviet pastoral\"--actually appeared in the official Soviet press in 1931. This novel offers an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy world of early Soviet \"production\" prose.