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Sergey Gandlevsky's 2002 novel Illegible has a double time focus, centering on the immediate experiences of Lev Krivorotov, a twenty-year-old poet living in Moscow in the 1970s, as well as his retrospective meditations thirty years later after most of his hopes have foundered. As the story begins, Lev is involved in a tortured affair with an older woman and consumed by envy of his more privileged friend and fellow beginner poet Nikita, one of the...
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Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical-critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly,...
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The metaphor of the nomad may at first seem surprising for Russia given its history of serfdom, travel restrictions, and strict social hierarchy. But as the imperial center struggled to tame a vast territory with ever-expanding borders, ideas of mobility, motion, travel, wandering, and homelessness came to constitute important elements in the discourse about national identity. For Russians of the nineteenth century national identity was anything but...
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What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between...
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Haunted Dreams is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to cultural representations of adolescence in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Jenny Kaminer situates these cultural representations within the broader context of European and Anglo-American scholarship on adolescence and youth, and she explores how Russian writers, dramatists, and filmmakers have repeatedly turned to the adolescent protagonist in exploring the myriad...
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All Future Plunges to the Past explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile...
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When banks and sandwich shops have more pride than we do, where can we go to be with our tribe?
It's 2022. There's a rainbow flag in every high-street window, and no lesbian bar. Enter The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs: a lesbian choir on a mission to unite a disparate and dwindling community. Led by a world-weary conductor, the choir flirt, gossip and attempt to sing their way onto the main stage at Pride.
But harmony is more easily dreamt than realised...
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Love for Sale is the first study to examine the ubiquity of commercial sex in Russian literary and artistic production from the nineteenth century through the fin de siècle. Colleen Lucey offers a compelling account of how the figure of the sex worker captivated the public's imagination through depictions in fiction and fine art, bringing to light how imperial Russians grappled with the issue of sexual commerce. Studying a wide range of media-from...
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Soviet Samizdat traces the emergence and development of samizdat, one of the most significant and distinctive phenomena of the late Soviet era, as an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. Based on extensive research of the underground journals, bulletins, art folios and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi analyzes the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community...
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"This book is devoted to the history of literary exchanges between publishers, critics, and readers in the West with authors in Russia during the Cold War. Tamizdat are manuscripts rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication at home but smuggled through various channels out of the country and printed elsewhere with or without their authors' knowledge or consent."--
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