BiblioVault - Books about Russian & Soviet

Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov

The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text

Robert L. Belknap

Northwestern University Press, 1990

Robert L. Belknap is the author of The Structure of "The Brothers Karamazov," which is generally regarded as one of the best studies on Dostoevsky produced by the present generation of scholars. The Genesis of "The Brothers Karamazov" continues and complements Belknap's earlier work, tracing Dostoevsky's last, great novel to its sources and exploring the works Dostoevsky read and consciously employed in constructing it.

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The Gift of Active Empathy

Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky

Alina Wyman

Northwestern University Press, 2016

This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.

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The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube)

Peter Esterhazy

Northwestern University Press, 1999

Winner of the 2004 German Publishers and Booksellers Association Peace Prize

In The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Péter Esterházy tells the story of a professional traveler, commissioned--like Marco Polo by Kublai Khan--to undertake a voyage of discovery and prepare a travelogue. Communicating the details of his journey through terse and surreal telegrams, the Traveller weaves a rich tapestry of narratives, evoking the ethereal past and the precarious present of a disappearing world.

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Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Informal Problem-Solving in human life

Edited by Alena Ledeneva

University College London, 2024

A journey through the informal and taken-for-granted ways of getting things done across the world.

For a post-human hitchhiker, human life–with its anxiety, aging, illness, and constant need for problem-solving–may look unviable. Yet, for humans, the life struggle is softened by human touch, human emotion, and human cooperation.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 continues the journey of the two previous volumes into the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules, and hidden practices. It focuses on issues of emotional ambivalence and pressures of the digital age. The informal practices presented in this volume demonstrate the urgency of alleviating tensions between continuity and all-too-rapid change and the need to tackle the central problem of modern societies—uncertainty.

The volume takes the reader on a biographical journey through elusive, taken-for-granted, or banal ways of getting things done from over seventy countries and world regions. It offers an innovative understanding of the significance of fringes and challenges the assumption that informality is associated exclusively with poverty, underdevelopment, the Global South, oppressive regimes, or the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It also maps the patterns of informality around the globe, identifies specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way, and documents their ambivalent impact on people engaged in problem-solving, on societies in which these problems arise, and on humanity overall.

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Global Russian Cultures

Edited by Kevin M. F. Platt

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when "Russian" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic "home" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and cultural life of Russians who in successive waves of migration have dispersed to the United States, Europe, and Israel, or who remained after the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian states.

The volume's internationally renowned contributors treat the many different global Russian cultures not as "displaced" elements of Russian cultural life but rather as independent entities in their own right. They describe diverse forms of literature, music, film, and everyday life that transcend and defy political, geographic, and even linguistic borders. Arguing that Russian cultures today are many, this volume contends that no state or society can lay claim to be the single or authentic representative of Russianness. In so doing, it contests the conceptions of culture and identity at the root of nation-building projects in and around Russia.

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Gogol's Afterlife

The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia

Caryl Emerson

Northwestern University Press, 2002

Gogol's claim to the title of national literary classic is incontestable. An exemplar of popular audiences no less than for the intelligentsia, Gogol was pressed into service under the tsarist and Soviet regimes for causes both aesthetic and political, official and unofficial. In Gogol's Afterlife, Stephen Moeller-Sally explores how he achieved this peculiar brand of cultural authority and later maintained it, despite dramatic shifts in the organization of Russian literature and society.

Part I charts the historical and cultural currents that shaped Gogol's reputation, devoting particular attention to the models of authorship Gogol himself devised in response to his changing audience and developing authorial mission. Part II takes a panoramic view of the social milieu in which Gogol's status evolved. Finally, Part III examines the place of the classics in Soviet culture, with a focus on Gogol's role in the cultural revolution and his peculiar relationship with state power under Stalinism.

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Gogol's Artistry

Andrei Bely, translated by Christopher Colbath

Northwestern University Press, 2009

When one great author engages another, as Andrei Bely so brilliantly does in Gogol’s Artistry, the result is inevitably a telling portrait of both writers. So it is in Gogol’s Artistry. Translated into English for the first time, this idiosyncratic, exhaustive critical study is as interesting for what it tells us about Bely’s thought and method as it is for its insights into the oeuvre of his literary predecessor. Bely’s argument in this book is that Gogol’s earlier writing should be given more consideration than most critics have granted. Employing what might be called a scientific perspective, Bely considers how often certain colors appear; he diagrams sentences and discusses Gogol’s prose in terms of mathematical equations. The result, as strange and engaging as Bely’s best fiction, is also an innovative, thorough, and remarkably revealing work of criticism.

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Goncharov's "Oblomov"

A Critical Companion

Gayla Diment

Northwestern University Press, 1998

No other novel has been used to describe the "Russian mentality" or "Russian soul" as frequently as Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, first published in 1859. This guide will enable readers to appreciate fully the remarkable talent of the writer and his masterpiece.

All the essays were written specifically for this volume and are published here for the first time. The book also includes an introduction, autobiographical materials, an annotated bibliography, and letters never before translated into English.

Contributors: Galya Diment, John Givens, Beth Holmgren, Karl D. Kramer, Ronald D. LeBlanc, Alexandar Mihailovic, and Brian Thomas Oles.

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Good-Bye Samizdat

Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground Writing

Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz

Northwestern University Press, 1992

Good-bye, Samizdat offers the first collection of the best of Czechoslovakia's samizdat, underground texts from the era 1948 through 1990. Divided into three sections, the volume includes fiction, cultural and political works, and philosophical essays. The writings reflect the thought of some of Czechoslovakia's best-known minds--Klima, Vaculik, and Havel--as well as others yet unknown in the West. Taken together, they capture the artistic and intellectual mood of a country situated at a focal point between East and West at a fascinating point in history.

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Greetings, Pushkin!

Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard

Jonathan Brooks Platt

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016

In 1937, the Soviet Union mounted a national celebration commemorating the centenary of poet Alexander Pushkin’s death. Though already a beloved national literary figure, the scale and feverish pitch of the Pushkin festival was unprecedented. Greetings, Pushkin! presents the first in-depth study of this historic event and follows its manifestations in art, literature, popular culture, education, and politics, while also examining its philosophical underpinnings.
Jonathan Brooks Platt looks deeply into the motivations behind the Soviet glorification of a long-dead poet—seemingly at odds with the October Revolution’s radical break with the past. He views the Pushkin celebration as a conjunction of two opposing approaches to time and modernity: monumentalism, which points to specific moments and individuals as the origin point for cultural narratives, and eschatology, which glorifies ruptures in the chain of art or thought and the destruction of canons.
In the midst of the Great Purge, the Pushkin jubilee was a critical element in the drive toward a nationalist discourse that attempted to unify and subsume the disparate elements of the Soviet Union, supporting the move to “socialism in one country.”

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