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.
The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme simultaneous with the evolution of Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840—the century during which poets ...defined the main questions facing Russian literature and society. Harsha Ram shows how imperial ideology became implicated in an unexpectedly wide range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style, and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and the ruling monarch.
The first book-length study of the poetics of co-translation in the context of British and European modernismThis study focuses on the considerable but neglected body of works translated by S. S. ...Koteliansky in collaboration with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. It provides close-readings and broad cross-cultural contextualisations to assess the influence that translating from Russian had on the individual writers, as well as its resonance within the dynamics of modernist writing. Claire Davison shows that, read as an oeuvre, their various co-translations shed light on how their own creative vision was evolving, particularly through explorations of voice, consciousness, gender and polyidentity. And their co-translating ventures enriched their responses to the great classics but also invited innovative dialogues with other genres: critical essays, biography and early-twentieth-century writing from Russia. The focus here is on co-translation as praxis. Looking specifically at the immediate post-revolutionary and post-war years, when political, ideological and aesthetic interests were so intertwined, the book examines the cultural and historical dynamics of translation, which reveal a clear interface between literary creation, textual production, publishing networks and the literary translator.
Key Features:
The first in-depth study of the impact that translating from the Russian had on these individual writers as well as on the shaping of modernist poetics in general
*Feeds into a recent renewal of interest in the intense era of Russian fever in the early 20th century
*Focuses on the processes of translating including negotiations with style, voice, and textual rhythm
The paper deals with intertextuality in a novel by Dmitry Lvovich Bykov. Based on the results of textual analysis, the author describes how quotations and allusions have an influence on ge-neration ...of meanings in the novel Opravdaniye. Examples of intertextuality are researched from the point of view of two types of model readers. First, the author demonstrates how the naive reader gains concrete impulses from intertextuality to form a semantic level, which is connected with the main character‘s theory about the Great Purge. Intertextuality is consequently analyzed in connection with the critical reader who forms the opposite meaning. On the basis of these results, the paper provides examples of fictional peepholes to interpret antihuman terror.
The article analyzes the novel “Živite v Moskve” (2000) by the conceptual writer and artist Dmitrij Prigov (1940–2007). The main aim of the paper is to find out how the author approaches the issue of ...memory and remembering. The article shows that the novel does not attempt to reconstruct the factual past events. It uses memory as an instrument for the production of fictional events which are based on the narrative and discursive schemata embedded in the narrator’s conscience. Therefore, the act of remembering can be seen as platonic anamnesis (recollection). It means that the narrator recollects the schemata, however, the latter do not exist as “pure” forms, but they are graspable only in the form of a very concrete literary realization.
The object of the study is the notion “absence” referring to the basic abstract notions that play a significant role in the conceptual system of any language and are of social and cultural ...significance. The subject of the research includes poetic contexts in which this notion is represented. Poetic texts have not been chosen by random since it is in them that the reflection of the perception of “absence” reveals the cognitive potential of personalities who individually select and use verbal means that convey this notion. The study of the mechanisms of the formation and representation of the notion “absence” in a poetic text is carried out taking into account the principle of anthropocentrism as a fundamental one in cognitive linguistics. Linguocognitive analysis based on the theory of prototypical description of lexico-grammatical phenomena makes it possible to identify a wide range of representation of the notion “absence” in poetic discourse.
The paper presents a selection of poems about the sea, written by Russian lyric poets in the 19th century. The descriptive aspect in the poems is imbued by the emotional experience and actual mood of ...the authors. At the same time, the changing sight of the sea, the abundance of its luminous tints and sounding modulations are shown with high poetic mastery suggesting a certain parallel between the dynamism of the sea and the alternating states of the human mind. Parts of the texts indicate the authors’ disposition to transcendence.
The paper focuses on the endings of two novels by two authors, The Silver Dove by A. Bely (1909) and Despair by V. Nabokov (1934) to reveal how the latter responds to the tradition of Symbolism and ...its emblematic author-theorist. The influence of A. Bely on V. Nabokov is considered in the paper as a multidimensional phenomenon, not only as following in the footsteps of the accepted heritage or its denial. Rather, it is the student’s attention to the master of the poetic form, giving rise to stylistic parallels, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is the attitude to the literary predecessor being overcome, expressed in complex transformations. The finest genre of the second type of attitude is parody (ambivalent in its nature), parody, concerning here both ideological and philosophical criticism.
The Vortex That Unites Us is a
study of totality in Russian literature, from the foundation of the
modern Russian state to the present day. Considering a
diversity of texts that have in common ...chiefly their prominence in
the Russian literary canon, Jacob Emery examines the persistent
ambition in Russian literature to gather the whole world into an
artwork. Emery reveals how the diversity of totalizing figures in
the Russian canon-often in alliance with ideologies like the
totalitarian state or enlightenment reason-strive for the frontiers
of space and time in order to guarantee the coherence of the globe
and the continuity of history. He expores subjects like romantic
metaphors of supernatural possession; Tolstoy's conception of art
as a vector of emotional contagion; the panoramic ambitions of the
avant-garde to grasp the globe in a new poetic medium; efforts of
Soviet utopians to harmonize the whole of social life along
aesthetic lines; Mandelstam's evocation of writing as a
transcendental authority that guarantees a grandiose historical
rhythm even when manifested as authoritarian repression; and the
mass market of cultural commodities in which the exiled Vladimir
Nabokov found success with his novel Lolita. The Vortex That
Unites Us reveals a common thread in the disparate works it
explores, bringing into a single horizon a variety of typically
siloed texts and aesthetic approaches. In all these cases, the
medium of totality is the body, inspired by artistic vision and
compelled by aesthetic response.
