As an émigré writer living outside of Ukraine, Yurii Kosach constructed an “imaginary homeland” through his treatment of history, culture, and memory in his literary works. This article analyzes ...these categories in Kosach’s meta-narratives of the artist in exile, by focusing on the texts “Zaproshennia na Tsyteru” (An Invitation to Cythera, 1945), Skorbna symfoniia (The Sorrowful Symphony, undated), and Senior Nikolo (Signore Nikolo, 1954). Kosach’s characters are placed between exile and homeland, nation and empire, and self and other. All these notions are included in a discourse that is inclusive rather than oppositional. Following a strategy used by Lesia Ukrainka, Yurii Kosach also tests the artist’s ability to create in lands beyond one’s homeland and in conditions of cultural oppression. Each story plot of the analyzed narratives is constructed in terms of the cultural and national aspects of the artist’s identity.
After the October Revolution, those against the Bolshevik regime started to leave Russia, including Russian aristocrats, officials, capitalists and intellectuals. Some of them were exiled to the ...cities of China. Among them, Shanghai was the largest after Harbin Russian overseas center. Russian emigres in Shanghai managed to create their own cultural life, and some of them were even engaged in literary creation. Thus, Russian emigre literature came into being in Shanghai. In order to have a more comprehensive grasp of Shanghai Russian literature, this thesis provides a general introduction about newspapers, periodicals, publishing houses, art and literary groups, main writers and creation themes of overseas Russians in Shanghai.
Nabokov's novel Glory (Podvig, 1932) was often viewed as a "regression" to traditional novel writing and, therefore, perceived as untypical for the innovative modernist Nabokov (Sirin). More recently ...there have been critical voices reading the novel as marked by Silver Age aesthetics, not least for its fantasy and fairytale elements and its inclusion of subtexts such as Shakespeare's The Tempest. My article argues the later approach, specifically examining in detail the allusions to Shakespeare's play as a vital key to a new interpretation. In my reading, Martin Edelweiss, the novel's dreamy protagonist is an Ariel figure and his earthbound opposite and friend and rival Darwin, a Caliban figure. It examines the question whether there are no other ways to cross forbidden borders than physically traversing them and that the "wizard" who created both Martin-Ariel and Darwin-Caliban used them as symbolic figures and pointers to his own artistic mission which - in the tradition of the "shipwreck survivor" Arion - is to accept survival as a means to salvage Russian literary culture in spite of the Soviet-Zoorlandian threat to it, but also émigré resistance to "cosmopolitan" innovation and accusations of having "betrayed" true Russian values.
The papers of Zygmunt Haupt, Polish émigré writer and painter, are now fully processed and open to researches in the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, many Russian writers including Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) and Nadezhda Teffi (1872-1952) immigrated to France. Their works were imbued with longing for ...the bygone epoch and for their lost motherland. In Russian émigré literature, this nostalgic outlook produced the mythology of the Belle Époque as the period of prosperity and social harmony. This romanticized view of the past became integrated in the political and intellectual discourses of two influential French writers, Romain Gary (1914-1980) and Elsa Triolet (1896-1970). The article addresses how Russian nostalgia for a pre-1917 period paved the way for the rise of the myth of the Belle Époque, a myth that became increasingly influential in twentieth-century French history.
Materials at the Library of Congress (LC) by and about Russian émigrés take every form and are distributed throughout the library's many custodial divisions, classification schedules, catalogs, and ...Web pages. Identifying and locating these materials, whether in print, archival, or even digital collections, may require creative thinking and an understanding of the library's sometimes complex organization. The author attempts here to provide a preliminary overview of the library's Russian émigré collections and some guidance for beginning research on these collections. She includes examples as illustrations and inspiration for further research.
The word poshlost’ denotes the concepts of banality, vulgarity or phlistinism, and has been an intellectual and cultural obsession since the second half of the nineteenth century, lasting well into ...the twentieth century. Russian author Vladimir Nabokov attempted to familiarize English-speaking readers with the notion of poshlost’ in his book Nikolai Gogol (1944); it is hard to find any English-language exposition of the term that does not cite Nabokov’s vigorous elaboration of it. Moreover, it is arguably a convention in scholarship to acknowledge the relationship between poshlost’ and Nabokov’s uncompromising moral and aesthetic values. Poshlost’ has often been discussed as a theme in Nabokov’s fiction, and its bearing on Nabokov’s role as a cultural critic has often been assessed, but there are few studies that examine how the concept influences the overall composition and interpretation of his fiction.
This thesis examines how poshlost’ functions as a literary device in Nabokov’s final Russian-language novel Dar (1938), which tells the story of an émigré Russian writer living in Berlin in the 1920s. I look at poshlost’ from the perspective of the theories of aesthetic innovation advanced by semiotician and cultural theorist Iurii Lotman, and within this framework I link poshlost’ with the formation and re-formation of the protagonist’s, as well as the author’s, consciousness. I consider it a relational construct rather than simply an immanent feature of the text, as it would be considered in Russian Formalist approaches. Among the topics I focus on are individuation, self-modelling and autocommunication as facets of the process of personal and creative maturation. I argue that poshlost’ serves as a means of modelling Nabokov’s aesthetics as a textual feature and is a multisignifying and a multifaceted device whose overall artistic effect depends on the conditions under which it is employed.
Emigre literature counters the sense of rupture with homeward compulsion. Polish emigre literature is set apart in discussions of cultural fission and fusion by its far-reaching import and abiding ...presence in the national culture.
Duties and obligations of the emigre writer include perpetuating as much as possible of Poland's past traditions and preserving the continuity of Polish thought and cultural institutions. The Polish ...emigre perspectives in the novels of Jozef Mackiewicz are presented.
Aleksander Wat is profiled. Wat's poetry, including "Moj wiek" (My century), left its mark on emigre literature and "domestic" critical opinion. Wat did not receive the attention his work deserved ...until after his death.
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