Reclaims the lost history of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative theaters

The Moscow Kamerny Theatre created stage worlds of movement, color, and light. Cofounded in 1914 by Alexander Tairov, a Jewish director from Ukraine, and Alisa Koonen, a Moscow-born actress from an immigrant family, the company celebrated the actor’s virtuosic inventiveness during an era when most theaters imitated daily life or prioritized the autocratic director’s vision. By the 1920s, it had become the most famous Soviet theater in the world, renowned for its actors’ acrobatic grace, its bold collaborations with avant-garde artists, and its revolutionary redefinition of what theater can be. But the accusations of Soviet disloyalty that were used to destroy the Kamerny during Stalin’s post–World War II antisemitic purge have rendered it little known outside Russia today and frequently misunderstood even there.

The Actor’s Revolution vividly reclaims this lost history by reconstructing the theater’s most illustrious premieres, analyzing them within the turbulent artistic and political context of the early Soviet era. Drawing on a decade of archival research, Dassia N. Posner restores Tairov’s legacy as one of history’s most significant directors and celebrates Koonen’s liberatory physical expressiveness as a vital alternative to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s better-known acting system. Drawing on rich archival sources, from unpublished memoirs to vibrant scenic and costume designs, this timely volume grapples with the entangled histories of art, politics, and erasure and celebrates the radical power of human creativity under—and in spite of—totalitarianism.

This book brings together for the first time in English the major writings of Mikhail Epstein, one of post-Soviet Russia's most prominent theoreticians of cultural studies and postmodernism. Written from a non-Western point of view yet informed by a familiarity with Western literary theory, it offers a fresh, lucid perspective on the post-communist literary scene as well as a practical and theoretical introduction to the new discipline of Russian “culturology.”

Aleksandr Tvardovskii was not only one of the finest, most popular and most important poets of his epoch, but also the editor of Novyi mir, the most prominent Soviet literary journal of the postwar period until the 1970s. This book is a detailed biography of the writer and journal editor who probably changed the literary culture of the Soviet Union more than any other person in the two decades after Stalin's death. Geoffrey Hosking shows how Tvardovskii gradually evolved from being an ardent Stalinist who renounced his own so-called “kulak” family to becoming a convinced advocate of tolerance, an all-human morality, civil rights, and free literary creativity.
By giving a balanced account of his strengths and weaknesses, his achievements and failures, the author succeeds in giving the fullest picture available anywhere of a controversial man who turns out to be more complex than he has been portrayed so far. To understand him better is to understand why the Soviet intelligentsia changed so fundamentally in the USSR’s final decades, a change that helps to explain the rise of Gorbachev twenty years later. The study—which includes an in-depth analysis of Tvardovskii’s major works—also helps to better understand the fate of culture under an authoritarian regime and the intricacies of the struggle against censorship.

Alexander Pushkin’s four compact plays, later known as The Little Tragedies, were written at the height of the author’s creative powers, and their influence on many Russian and Western writers cannot be overestimated. Yet Western readers are far more familiar with Pushkin’s lyrics, narrative poems, and prose than with his drama. The Little Tragedies have received few translations or scholarly examinations. Setting out to redress this and to reclaim a cornerstone of Pushkin’s work, Evodokimova and her distinguished contributors offer the first thorough critical study of these plays. They examine the historical roots and connective themes of the plays, offer close readings, and track the transformation of the works into other genres.

This volume includes a significant new translation by James Falen of the plays—"The Covetous Knight," "Mozart and Salieri," "The Stone Guest," and "A Feast in Time of Plague."

Women’s studies are still in their infancy in Poland and this pioneering book is one of the most comprehensive and well-researched studies on nineteenth-century Polish women prose writers. Selecting writers that reflect the most turbulent time in Polish women’s literature, such as Klementyna Hoffmanowa, Narcyza Zmichovska, Eliza Orzeszkowa and Zofia Nalkowska. Borkowska’s approach of major feminist theories and post-feminist thought results in astonishing findings that throw new light on Polish women writers and their contribution to European thought. The author’s intelligent and effective use of feminist criticism and clarity of thought make Alienated Women a landmark study, suitable for (all students) and scholars of Polish literature, women’s studies and feminist theory.

This study is an exploration of the dichotomy of faith and science as presented in the writings of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

The last volume of the Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 series presents 46 texts under the heading of "antimodernism". In a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the antimodernist political discourse in the region offered complex ideological constructions of national identification. These texts rejected the linear vision of progress and instead offered alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one as well as various narratives of decline. This shift was closely connected to the rejection of liberal democratic institutionalism, and the preference for organicist models of social existence, emphasizing the role of the elites (and charismatic leaders) shaping the whole body politic. Along these lines, antimodernist authors also formulated alternative visions of symbolic geography: rejecting the symbolic hierarchies that focused on the normativity of Western European models, they stressed the cultural and political autarchy of their own national community, which in some cases was also coupled with the reevaluation of the Orient. At the same time, this antimodernist turn should not be confused with rightwing radicalism—in fact, the dialogue with the modernist tradition was often very subtle and the anthology also contains texts which offered a criticism of 'modern' totalitarianism in an antimodernist key.

This volume discusses documentary film, theatre, and literature from the 1960s to the 2020s in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. It presents new developments in documentary aesthetics in the region but also expands on the political, medial, and aesthetic developments that shaped Soviet attitudes towards documentary arts and their legacy. Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine has given documentary practices a new urgency. All over the region, documentary art has become a tool to counter-act the media and memory conflict waged, evidence practices of decolonization and address the archival heritage of totalitarian times. The book reflects on documentary approaches as an interdisciplinary and collaborative artistic tool in politically transformative and violent times. The innovative volume is designed as a research monograph for scholars and students of literature, culture, film, theatre, memory and trauma studies, but also at general readers interested in the documentary arts.

On September 29 and 30, 1941, in one of the largest mass murders of the Holocaust, German troops massacred 33,771 Jews at the vast gorge located near Kyiv known as Babi Yar (Babij Jar). During and after the war, the territory was modified, redesigned, and converted in order to remove the physical signs of genocide, including the exhumation and incineration of thousands of bodies. In large part this erasure was the result of policies implemented by the Soviet regime, which refused to accept that there had been a “special war” against Jews. 

Beginning with an explication of the mass murders and their aftermath, Antonella Salomoni examines the afterlife of a massacre whose physical remains were intentionally hidden. She focuses especially on how the arts—prose, poetry, music, architecture, and painting—shaped a collective narrative that, despite repression, played a crucial role in preserving the history and memory of the genocide.

Rediscovering a lost luminary of modernism and the Russian avant-garde
 
This kaleidoscopic biography offers readers a compelling microhistory of a revolutionary moment in art and politics through its portrait of an enigmatic but influential figure: Ivan Aksyonov authored the first book-length study about Pablo Picasso, translated Elizabethan drama, and was a literary adviser to Vsevolod Meyerhold, as well as a teacher of Sergei Eisenstein in Meyerhold’s institute and an important critic, before dying in 1935. Lars Kleberg traces Aksyonov’s influences, interlocutors, and creative output in multiple genres and media to bring a complicated and fascinating character back to life. Kleberg invites us to reconsider the avant-garde and to understand the political and artistic ferment of the revolutionary era and its aftermath in new, deeper ways.