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424 books match the query 'Russian & Soviet' and 21 start with d

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Daniil Kharms

By Branislav Jakovljevic

Northwestern University Press, 2009

The "texts" of Russian artist and thinker Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) were so many and varied and often unique (narrative, dramatic, philosophical, poetic, mathematical, pictographic, diagrammatic, musical, biographical) that they defied categorization—and, thus, thorough study or appreciation—through much of the twentieth century. This book, the first in English to view Kharms’s oeuvre in its entirety, is also the first to offer a complete, inclusive, and coherent understanding of the overall project of this artist and writer now considered a major figure in the modernist canon of Europe.

The book follows Kharms’s development as a creative thinker, inquiring into the nature of Kharmsian nonsense, the ontological status of the OBERIU object, writing as performance, Kharms’s gestural language, his "language machines," and his ideas of order, number, infinity, and chance. Reading every paper trace (as well as extant memories) of Kharms’s activities as part of a large project of world creation, Branislav Jakovljevic situates him in a twentieth-century effort—exemplified by Kafka, Beckett, Artaud, Malevich, and Khelbnikov, among others—to go beyond an interpretation of meaning circumscribed by rational and logical thought. Examining texts that could conceivably be called "literary" as well as sketches, diagrams, hieroglyphs, photographs, and unclassifiable others, Jakovljevic’s study is the first to provide a properly broad perspective on this creative thinker’s farranging, far-reaching, and finally comprehensive achievement.

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Developments in Russian Politics 10

Henry E. Hale, Juliet Johnson, and Tomila V. Lankina, editors

Duke University Press, 0

The tenth edition of this go-to text offers critical discussion of contemporary Russian politics and its fundamental principles. It covers established topics such as executive leadership, parties, and elections as well as newer issues of national identity, protest, and Russia and Greater Eurasia. Taking a bottom-up approach, Developments in Russian Politics 10 analyzes the political system in which Putin’s influence can be understood and covers frequently overlooked topics like the informal economy, climate change, and gender. The book is organized around the informal politics of hybrid regimes and authoritarianism and accounts for how Russian history impacts contemporary politics in counterintuitive ways, addressing notions of hybrid warfare, disinformation, and election meddling. The chapters have a modular quality and are designed to correspond to course teaching. Compiled by an international team of specialists and offering key questions, further reading suggestions, and a list of up-to-date repositories of video material, the edition will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the world.

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Developments in Russian Politics 9

Richard Sakwa, Henry E. Hale, and Stephen White, editors

Duke University Press, 2019

In Developments in Russian Politics 9 an international team of experts provides a clearly written and comprehensive account of the country's most recent developments, offering critical discussions of key areas in contemporary domestic and foreign Russian politics. All essays are either new or comprehensively rewritten for this volume and examine topics ranging from executive leadership, political parties, and elections to newer issues of national identity, protest, and Russia and greater Eurasia. They also address the military, parliamentary politics, the economy, social inequality, and media and political communication in the digital age. Reflecting the changing nature of Russian politics in a globalizing world defined by ever-shifting balances of power and Russia’s rising tensions with the West, Developments in Russian Politics remains the best introduction to the politics of the world's largest nation.

Contributors. Samuel Charap, Valentina Feklyunina, Henry E. Hale, Philip Hanson, Kathryn Hendley, Marlene Laruelle, Ellen Mickiewicz, Ben Noble, Thomas F. Remington, Bettina Renz, Ora John Reuter, Graeme Robertson, Richard Sakwa, Darrell Slider, Stephen White, John P. Willerton

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Dialogics of the Oppressed

Peter Hitchcock

University of Minnesota Press, 1992

Dialogics of the Oppressed was first published in 1992. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Formulated within and against the context of Russian formalism that became the backbone of semiotics, Mikhail Bakhtin's work has enabled contemporary critical theories to return to specific sociopolitical and historical moments that had been closed off by formalist abstractions. In Dialogics of the Oppressed, Peter Hitchcock looks through the lens of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism for an analysis of subaltern writing. Rather than assume an integral "subaltern subject" as the object of analysis, Hitchcock - in case studies of four global feminists, Nawal el Saadawi, Pat Barker, Zhang Jie, and Agnes Smedley - emphasizes the cultural agency of the subaltern and shows the political implications this agency might have for literary analysis in general and cultural studies in particular.

"Presents a provocative set of readings-through the Bakhtinian model of dialogism-of texts by four women writers of the twentieth century. . . instructive and compelling." Barbara Harlow, University of Texas

Dialogics of the Oppressed argues from an internationalistic perspective to underline that the heterogeneity of dialogic feminism itself constitutes a significant array of discursive resistance to the hegemony of disciplines and so-called area studies operative in the metropolitan First World academy. Hitchcock demonstrates through dialogic analyses of the writings of these four feminists that a form of multicultural materialism can itself disrupt the restrictive logics and practices of literary studies in the Western academy, and that indeed, there is a counterlogic in the culture of the subaltern. Hitchcock's underlying objective is the development of a powerful critique of the epistemological bases of the academy that marginalize and devalorize certain cultural productions and subjects, as well as a cognitive mapping of the politics of pedagogy in current transformations of disciplinarity.

Peter Hitchcock is professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice and has published essays on radical writing, multiculturalism, film, and Third World fiction.

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Dialogues/Dialogi

Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (Ex)Soviet and American Women

Susan Hardy Aiken, Adele Barker, Maya Koreneva, and Ekaterina Stetsenko

Duke University Press, 1993

Co-authored by Russian, Ukrainian, and American critics, Dialogues/Dialogi is the first fully collaborative and comparative study of American and (ex)Soviet women writers. Truly a dialogue, the book juxtaposes fiction by American and Soviet women from the 1960s to the present to reveal their similarities and differences and to show how questions of gender, race, and ethnicity are enacted in the societies and psyches each text represents. Begun in the early days of glasnost and completed in 1992, the book conveys the spirit and excitement of an unprecedented critical conversation conducted during a time of historic transformation.
Dialogues/Dialogi pairs stories by Tillie Olsen, Toni Cade Bambara, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Leslie Marmon Silko (reprinted here in full) with Russian stories by I. Grekova, Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Elena Makarova, and Anna Nerkagi, many of them appearing here for the first time in English. Exquisite in their stylistic and thematic variety, suggestive of the range of women's experience and fiction in both countries, each story is the subject of paired interpretive essays by an American and an (ex)Soviet critic from among the book's authors.
A colloquy of diverse voices speaking together in multiple, mutually illuminating exchanges, Dialogues/Dialogi testifies to the possibility of evolving relationships among women across borders once considered impassable.

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Dialogues

Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov, Stories about Ourselves

Ksenia Nouril

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state’s aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and novels, Kabakov and Pivovarov’s albums were also the basis for unique performance pieces, as the artists invited select audiences to their Moscow apartments for private readings and viewings of the albums, helping to cultivate an alternative artistic community in the process.

This exhibition catalog brings together Kabakov and Pivovarov’s key works for the first time, putting the two artists in dialogue and recreating their artistic community. It not only includes nearly hundred pages of full-color illustrations, but also provides complete English translations of the Russian texts that appear in the volume, plus new interviews with each artist. Taken together, they give viewers a new appreciation of the different aesthetic strategies each artist used to depict the absurdities of everyday life in the Soviet era. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.

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Dimitry's Shade

A Reading of Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov

J. Douglas Clayton

Northwestern University Press, 2004

In an ambitious reinterpretation of the premier work of Russia's national poet, J. Douglas Clayton reads Boris Godunov as the expression of Alexander Pushkin's thinking about the Russian state, especially the Russian state of his own time (some two hundred years distant from the events of the play), and even his own place within that state. Here we see how the play marks a sharp break with the Decembrists and Pushkin's own youthful liberalism, signaling its author's emergence as a Russian conservative. Boris Godunov, Clayton argues, can be best understood as an ideologically conservative defense of autocracy.

Sure to shock readers even as it persuades them, Dimitry's Shade reveals, incarnated in Boris Godunov, those three elements that were to become the slogan of Nicholas's Russia in the 1830s: autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality.

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Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky

Susanne Fusso

Northwestern University Press, 2008

Most discussions of sexuality in the work of Dostoevsky have been framed in Freudian terms. But Dostoevsky himself wrote about sexuality from a decidedly pre-Freudian perspective. By looking at the views of human sexual development that were available in Dostoevsky's time and that he, an avid reader and observer of his own social context, absorbed and reacted to, Susanne Fusso gives us a new way of understanding a critical element in the writing of one of Russia's literary masters. Beyond discovering Dostoevsky's own views and representations of sexuality as a reflection of his culture and his time, Fusso also explores his artistic treatment of how children and adolescents discover sexuality as part of their growth.

Some of the topics Fusso considers are Dostoevsky's search for an appropriate artistic language for sexuality, a young narrator's experimentation with homoerotic desire and unconventional narrative in A Raw Youth; and Dostoevsky's approach to a young man's sexual development in A Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov. She also explores his complex treatment of a child's secret sexuality in his account of the Kroneberg child abuse case in A Writer's Diary; and his conception of the ideal family, a type of family that appears in his works mainly by negative example. Focusing mainly on sexual practices considered "deviant" in Dostoevsky's time--both because these are the practices that his young characters confront and because they offer the most intriguing interpretive problems--Fusso decodes the author's texts and their social contexts. In doing so, she highlights one thread in the intricate thematic weave of Dostoevsky's novels and newly illuminates his artistic process.

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Distance Manipulation

The Russian Modernist Search for a New Drama

Joanna Kot

Northwestern University Press, 1999

At the turn of the century, there appeared in the Western world a stream of literary and dramatic works that confused their audiences to an unprecedented degree. Many of these works continue to confuse to this day and are avoided by theatre managers wishing to fill seats. Choosing for analysis a selection of five early-twentieth-century Russian plays, this book examines in detail the techniques, devices, and elements that the playwrights applied in order to undercut the traditional dramatic and theatrical expectations of their audiences.

Kot studies experimental dramas by Gippius, Sologub, Blok, and Ivanov, but the centerpiece of the book is Chekhov's Cherry Orchard his last and greatest play. Kot argues that it presents a subtle balance of distancing and emotive techniques.

An invaluable guide to the often bewildering nature of so-called "innovative" twentieth-century works, this book will appeal to anyone interested in modern theater.

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Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism

A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol

Donald Fanger

Northwestern University Press, 1998

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.

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Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life

Predrag Cicovacki

St. Augustine's Press, 2008

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Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground

Elizabeth A. Blake

Northwestern University Press, 2019

While Dostoevsky’s relation to religion is well-trod ground, there exists no comprehensive study of Dostoevsky and Catholicism. Elizabeth Blake’s ambitious and learned Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground fills this glaring omission in the scholarship. Previous commentators have traced a wide-ranging hostility in Dostoevsky’s understanding of Catholicism to his Slavophilism. Blake depicts a far more nuanced picture. Her close reading demonstrates that he is repelled and fascinated by Catholicism in all its medieval, Reformation, and modern manifestations. Dostoevsky saw in Catholicism not just an inspirational source for the Grand Inquisitor but a political force, an ideological wellspring, a unique mode of intellectual inquiry, and a source of cultural production. Blake’s insightful textual analysis is accompanied by an equally penetrating analysis of nineteenth-century European revolutionary history, from Paris to Siberia, that undoubtedly influenced the evolution of Dostoevsky’s thought.

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Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form

Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters

Greta Matzner-Gore

Northwestern University Press, 2020

Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.

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Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self

Yuri Corrigan

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic.

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche.

Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.

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Dostoevsky's "The Devils"

A Critical Companion

William Leatherbarrow

Northwestern University Press, 1999

The Devils is one of Dostoevsky's four major novels--and the most openly political of his works. Known by several names, including The Demons and The Possessed, this novel often anchors courses of Dostoevsky's works. This critical companion contains essays that shed light on both the tricky literary structure of the novel and its social and political components. In addition, editor W.J. Leatherbarrow provides a detailed introduction, extracts from Dostoevsky's correspondence about The Devils, and an annotated bibliography.

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Dostoevsky's "The Idiot"

A Critical Companion

Liza Knapp

Northwestern University Press, 1998

This book, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, is designed to guide readers through Dostoevsky's most mysterious and confusing work. It begins with introductory essays looking at where, when, and how The Idiot was written and at the novel's major characters. Other essays guide the reader through the author's plans and notebooks; use contemporary feminist criticism to shed light on how this novel explores alternatives to traditional roles; examine the ways in which the novel reflects Dostoevsky's concern with apocalypse, modernity, and time; and address the ways the novel's hero, Prince Myshkin, can be compared to Christ. A final section offers a rich collection of primary sources, including Dostoevsky's letters concerning The Idiot, and an annotated bibliography.

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Dostoevsky's Dialectics and the Problem of Sin

Ksana Blank

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin, Ksana Blank borrows from ancient Greek, Chinese, and Christian dialectical traditions to formulate a dynamic image of Dostoevsky’s dialectics—distinct from Hegelian dialectics—as a philosophy of “compatible contradictions.” Expanding on the classical triad of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, Blank guides us through Dostoevsky’s most difficult paradoxes: goodness that begets evil, beautiful personalities that bring about grief, and criminality that brings about salvation.

Dostoevsky’s philosophy of contradictions, this book demonstrates, contributes to the development of antinomian thought in the writings of early twentieth-century Russian religious thinkers and to the development of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin marks an important and original intervention into the enduring debate over Dostoevsky’s spiritual philosophy.

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Dostoevsky's Idiot

Dialogue and the Spiritually Good Life

Bruce A. French

Northwestern University Press, 2001

Prince Myshkin is one of Dostoevsky's most perplexing creations. In this study, Bruce A. French presents a provocative interpretation of the religious dimension of Myshkin's goodness from a Bakhtinian perspective.

In three chapters, French takes up in turn the narrator and narrative points of view, the author’s use of inserted narratives, and three modes of interaction French calls Monologue, Dialogue, and Dialogical Living.

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Dostoevsky's Secrets

Reading Against the Grain

Carol Apollonio

Northwestern University Press, 2009

When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts--the text--of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand.

In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in Poor Folk? Does "White Nights" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost--and what is won--in The Gambler? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in Crime and Punishment, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in Demons, is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their anaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.

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Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs

Lynn Ellen Patyk

Northwestern University Press, 2023

Confronting Bakhtin’s formative reading of Dostoevsky to recover the ways the novelist stokes conflict and engages readers—and to explore the reasons behind his adversarial approach

Like so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s deliberate deployment of provocation was both prescient and precocious. In this book, Lynn Ellen Patyk singles out these forms of incitement as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art. Challenging, revising, and expanding on Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational analysis in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Patyk demonstrates that provocation is the moving mover of Dostoevsky’s poetics of conflict, and she identifies the literary devices he uses to propel plot conflict and capture our attention. Yet the full scope of Dostoevsky’s provocative authorial activity can only be grasped alongside an understanding of his key themes, which both probed and exploited the most divisive conflicts of his era. The ultimate stakes of such friction are, for him, nothing less than moral responsibility and the truth of identity.

Sober and strikingly original, compassionate but not uncritical, Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs exposes the charged current in the wiring of our modern selves. In an economy of attention and its spoils, provocation is an inexhaustibly renewable and often toxic resource.

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