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 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 prism of literary criticism considers the trinity of early, mature and late stages of the writer’s artistic world and implies the idea of its evolutionary development. In Yu. V. Trifonov’s works, ...the evolutionary transitions are associated with the strengthening of the autobiographical principle, which is determined by the forms of characters’ ‘life-living’. They include the process of parting with illusions and ‘sensations of life’ in the early period of Trifonov’s writing, acceptance of the ‘reality of life’ in the mature one and the discovery of ‘knowledge’ in the late period. These processes ensured that Trifonov, who first invested his characters with selective autobiographical features, moved to the explicit autobiography in his last collection of short stories. The frank relations ‘Me – world’ established by the autobiographical hero of the short stories collection House Upside Down contribute to a radical change in Trifonov’s poetics, including narrative laconism (instead of detailed novel descriptions), an all-encompassing intention of memory excavation, the derivation of axiological ‘formulae of existence’.
Having a creation based on a Christian pattern, but also integrated into a universal cultural horizon, Dostoevsky was among the first writers to design, in all the psychological senses of the word, ...the human typology of the antihero. The enormous influence of the Russian writer can be identified in the universal literature, especially in the way in which such an unusual character began to respond, ideologically, to a different need, felt by literature consumers. From the ancient tragedy to the novel and the cinema, the antihero has different masks and, obviously, different forms of manifestation, within the same psychological matrix. Weakness, that sometimes is real or apparent, cowardice and fighting avoidance, along with a specific dimension of the trickster archetype, define the protein figure of the antihero.
The article, actually a would-be 3rd chapter of an intended piece of literary history, aims at retrieving, based on novel documents and on our own individual research, other defining moments in the ...history of the Romanian PEN Club, i.e. the activity with a view to consolidation in the years right after WWI. The recuperated sequences are integrated within the enlarged historical, political, social and cultural context of the time. The figure of Marcu Beza, the Romanian Anglicist and diplomat in London in the 1920s, is in close-up, together with that of Emanoil Bucuţa, the Secretary of the Romanian P.E.N in its first decade of activity, due to their determination in engaging Romanian writers in the emergent circuit of democratic values specific to western societies.
Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a ...transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe’s irreversible division. It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Through this cultural practice, I offer a new reading of Cold War Europe’s history . Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the ‘Other Europe’ to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature.
