Brothers Anton and Tolik reunite at their family home to bury their recently deceased mother. An otherwise natural ritual unfolds under extraordinary circumstances: their house is on the front line of a war ignited by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Isolated without power or running water, the brothers’ best hope for success and survival lies in the declared cease fire—the harvest truce. But such hopes are swiftly dashed, as it becomes apparent that the conflagration of war will not abate.
With echoes of Waiting for Godot, Serhiy Zhadan’s A Harvest Truce stages a tragicomedy in which the commonplace experiences of death, birth, and the cycles of life marked by the practices of growing and harvesting food are rendered futile and farcical in the wake of the indifferent juggernaut of war.
This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse.
The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic paleontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more “humanized” literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev’s Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the “long” 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era.
For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in émigré literary theory and criticism.
This is a new and thorough revision of a recognized classic whose first edition was hailed as the most authoritative account in English of the governing of the Soviet Union. Now, with historical material rearranged in chronological order, and with seven new chapters covering most of the last fifteen years, this edition brings the Soviet Union fully into the light of modern history and political science.
The purposes of Fainsod's earlier editions were threefold: to explain the techniques used by the Bolsheviks and Stalin to gain control of the Russian political system; to describe the methods they employed to maintain command; and to speculate upon the likelihood oftheir continued control in the future. This new edition increases very substantially the attention paid to another aspect of the political process—how policy is formed, how the Soviet Union is governed. Whenever possible, Mr. Hough attempts to analyze the alignments and interrelationships between Soviet policy institutions. Moreover, he constantly moves beyond a description of these institutions to probe the way they work. Two chapters are devoted to the questions of individual political participation. Other chapters examine the internal organization of institutions and explore the ways in which the backgrounds of their officials influence their policy positions and alliances. The picture that emerges is an unprecedented account of the distribution of power in the Soviet Union.
This exceptional bibliography, a pioneer work in its field, surveys Hungarian literature from its beginnings to 1965. A companion to the author's An Introductory Bibliography to the Study of Hungarian Literature, this volume contains over 4500 numbered entries which report on the first and later editions of the works of 162 authors. Mr. Tezla has included the major figures from each literary period and has based his selection of authors on the importance of their original writings to the development of this national literature. Significant authors who established substantial careers in Hungary and continued to write after their emigration are also represented in this comprehensive volume, as are a number of figures of secondary literary import.
Mr. Tezla begins his coverage of each author with a brief biographical account offering pertinent data on family background, education, and literary activities. The sketch provides as well observations on the writings of the author and his place in Hungarian literature and a record of the languages into which his works have been translated. Further material on the author is divided into annotated sections noting bibliographical, biographical, and critical studies.
As a means of helping the reader obtain titles through inter-library loan or through photographic processes, Mr. Tezla also includes location symbols for numbered items known to be available in selected libraries in the United States and Europe. Five appendixes, a glossary, and indexes provide additional bibliographic tools for both the beginning student and the advanced scholar researching Hungarian literature. The work is invaluable also as a buying guide for libraries seeking to develop a Hungarian collection.
“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.” —Kirkus
In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.
Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.
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