At the turn of the twentieth century, two young women find themselves in Stanyslaviv under Austro-Hungarian rule. Adela, the daughter of a wealthy German doctor, and Stefania, her orphan Ukrainian servant, could not be further apart socially and economically; but their fates intertwine in the cityscape of the late Habsburg Empire, densely inhabited by Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, and Jews for centuries. The intricate relationship between the two women—told by an unreliable narrator—unfolds against the backdrop of a rich ethnic, social, and cultural fabric that seems almost implausible to today’s reader who knows it to be irretrievably lost.
In Felix Austria, Sophia Andrukhovych uses techniques from Gothic literature to reconstruct with astonishing detail the atmosphere and the everyday life of Stanyslaviv. As if foreshadowing the wars to come and their devastation, the city’s population delights in earthly pleasures: extravagant dinner parties and receptions, mass celebrations, exotic theater performances, art exhibitions, glitzy shows of stars and starlets from near and far, local rituals of soap making, competition among fashionable dames, and much more. Felix Austria is a must-read for all those who seek to understand Ukraine’s deep ties with Western Europe and its struggle to break away from Russia’s orbit.
The early decades of the nineteenth century in Imperial Russia embraced a sequence of catastrophic events—the assassination of Paul I, Napoleon’s invasion, the Decembrist rebellion, the cholera epidemic, the Polish uprising—along with radical changes in the fabric of society. Yet, far from exhausted by these convulsions, Russian literature blossomed as never before, producing the first in the long line of novels now regarded as masterpieces throughout the world. With all the sentimentality, nostalgia, and mythic echoes the term evokes, posterity has called this the golden age of Russian letters.
William Mills Todd describes the ideology of the educated westernized gentry (obshchestvo) of the time, then charts the various possibilities for literary life: first patronage, the salons, popular literature; then the rapid emergence of an incipient literary profession, which was encouraged by copyright laws, journals and booksellers, and an increasing readership. Through an examination of three brilliant fictions—Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and Gogol’s Dead Souls—he explores the complicated interactions of literature and society as these writers “discovered” their own milieu and were discovered by it, confronting the fragility, exclusiveness, and potential for hypocrisy and self-delusion in Russian culture. Todd’s interdisciplinary approach will ensure his book’s appeal to students of comparative and other national literatures as well as of Russian culture.
The notion of the frame in art can refer not only to a material frame bordering an image, but also to a conceptual frame. Both meanings are essential to how the work is perceived. In Framing Russian Art, art historian Oleg Tarasov investigates the role of the frame in its literal function of demarcating a work of art and in its conceptual function affectingthe understanding of what is seen.
The first part of the book is dedicated to the framework of the Russian icon. Here, Tarasov explores the historical and cultural meanings of the icon’s,setting, and of the iconostasis. Tarasov’s study then moves through Russian and European art from ancient times to the twentieth century, including abstract art and Suprematism. Along the way, Tarasov pays special attention to the Russian baroque period and the famous nineteenth century Russian battle painter Vasily Vereshchagin. This enlightening account of the cultural phenomenon of the frame and its ever-changing functions will appeal to students and scholars of Russian art history.
As the subject of ideological, aesthetic, and existential manipulations, the Polish home and its representation is an ever-changing phenomenon that absorbs new tendencies and, at the same time, retains its centrality to Polish literature, whether written in Poland or abroad. Framing the Polish Home is a pioneering work that explores the idea of home as fundamental to the question of cultural and national identity within Poland's recent history and its tradition.
In this inaugural volume of the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series, the Polish home emerges in its rich verbal and visual representations and multiple material embodiments, as the discussion moves from the loss of the home during wartime to the Sovietized politics of housing and from the exilic strategies of having a home to the the idyllic evocation of the abodes of the past.
Although, as Bożena Shallcross notes in her introduction, “few concepts seem to have such universal appeal as the notion of the home,” this area of study is still seriously underdeveloped. In essays from sixteen scholars, Framing the Polish Home takes a significant step to correct that oversight, covering a broad range of issues pertinent to the discourse on the home and demonstrating the complexity of the home in Polish literature and culture.
The leading Polish poet still residing in his native land, Zbigniew Herbert as not been the subject of a book-length study in English until now. Stanislaw Baranczak, himself a poet, critic, and translator, emigrated from Poland only in 1981, and is therefore eminently qualified to supply a politico-cultural context for Herbert while describing and analyzing the texts and themes of his poems.
Herbert's poetry is based on permanent confrontation--the confrontation of Western tradition with the experience of a "barbarian" from Eastern Europe, of the classical past with the modern era, of cultural myth with a practical, empirical point of view. Baranczak illustrates these oppositions by examining, first, the complex relations between "disinheritance" and "heritage" as they appear in Herbert's work on various structural levels, from symbolic key words to lyrical characters; second, the forms and functions of Herbert's "unmasking metaphor"; third, his uses of irony; fourth, his ethical system, which enables him to be both ironist and moralist. Baranczak pays special attention to irony as the most conspicuous feature of Herbert's poetic method.
A Fugitive from Utopia makes Herbert's poetic ideas fully accessible to the general reader, and will also be of interest to students of Polish literature, of East European culture and society, and of modern poetry. Those who have already encountered Herbert's poetry in one of the several translations into English currently available will welcome this lucid explication of his work.
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