Results by title
424 books match the query 'Russian & Soviet' and 13 start with i
I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal
Snapshots from the East of UkraineOleksandr Mykhed, Tanya Savchynska, and David Mossop
Northwestern University Press, 2025
Exploring the post-Soviet landscape of the Ukrainian east in a complex journey of loss, hope, and history
In 2014, the Russian army, with support from local militants, occupied parts of Ukraine’s two easternmost regions—once the beating industrial heart of the Soviet Union—where coal extraction has since exhausted both the human population and the natural resources. In late 2016, Oleksandr Mykhed set out on a research trip to explore the deep history and contested present of the area from the perspective of a fellow countryman who’d never been there.
Mykhed brings us on a painful yet hopeful journey across the Ukrainian east, sharing conversations with locals, snippets from archival documents, and the complicated perspectives of prominent cultural figures, such as writer Serhiy Zhadan, historian Olena Stiazhkina, and philosopher Ihor Kozlovsky, who was imprisoned and tortured for nearly two years.
I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal invites us to meet generations of coal miners. To learn about the Belgian and British investors who founded the east’s industrial cities. To remember the harrowing events of the First and Second World Wars and the incalculable brutality of Soviet history. To see the activists who are even now working to improve the country. To hear sweet memories of a lost utopia that never existed. Mykhed provides a unique portrait of life in the east during the war, before the full-scale invasion that would change everything.
In 2014, the Russian army, with support from local militants, occupied parts of Ukraine’s two easternmost regions—once the beating industrial heart of the Soviet Union—where coal extraction has since exhausted both the human population and the natural resources. In late 2016, Oleksandr Mykhed set out on a research trip to explore the deep history and contested present of the area from the perspective of a fellow countryman who’d never been there.
Mykhed brings us on a painful yet hopeful journey across the Ukrainian east, sharing conversations with locals, snippets from archival documents, and the complicated perspectives of prominent cultural figures, such as writer Serhiy Zhadan, historian Olena Stiazhkina, and philosopher Ihor Kozlovsky, who was imprisoned and tortured for nearly two years.
I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal invites us to meet generations of coal miners. To learn about the Belgian and British investors who founded the east’s industrial cities. To remember the harrowing events of the First and Second World Wars and the incalculable brutality of Soviet history. To see the activists who are even now working to improve the country. To hear sweet memories of a lost utopia that never existed. Mykhed provides a unique portrait of life in the east during the war, before the full-scale invasion that would change everything.
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Icon and Devotion
Sacred Spaces in Imperial RussiaOleg Tarasov
Reaktion Books, 2002
Icon and Devotion offers the first extensive presentation in English of the making and meaning of Russian icons. The craft of icon-making is set into the context of forms of worship that emerged in the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century. Oleg Tarasov shows how icons have held a special place in Russian consciousness because they represented idealized images of Holy Russia. He also looks closely at how and why icons were made. Wonder-working saints and the leaders of such religious schisms as the Old Believers appear in these pages, which are illustrated in halftones with miniature paintings, lithographs and engravings never before published in the English-speaking world.
By tracing the artistic vocabulary, techniques and working methods of icon painters, Tarasov shows how icons have been integral to the history of Russian art, influenced by folk and mainstream currents alike. As well as articulating the specifically Russian piety they invoke, he analyzes the significance of icons in the cultural life of modern Russia in the context of popular prints and poster design.
By tracing the artistic vocabulary, techniques and working methods of icon painters, Tarasov shows how icons have been integral to the history of Russian art, influenced by folk and mainstream currents alike. As well as articulating the specifically Russian piety they invoke, he analyzes the significance of icons in the cultural life of modern Russia in the context of popular prints and poster design.
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Icons Axed, Freedoms Lost
Russian Desecularization and a Ukrainian AlternativeVyacheslav Karpov
Rutgers University Press, 2025
In Icons Axed, Freedoms Lost, Vyacheslav Karpov and Rachel L. Schroeder demonstrate how Russia went from persecuting believers to jailing critics of religion and why, in contrast, religious pluralism and tolerance have solidified in Ukraine. Offering a richly documented history of cultural and political struggles that surrounded desecularization—the resurgence of religion’s societal role—from the end of the USSR to the Russo-Ukrainian war, they show Russian critics of desecularization adhered to artistic provocations, from axing icons to “punk-prayers” in cathedrals, and how Orthodox activists, in turn, responded by vandalizing controversial exhibits and calling on the state to crush “the enemies of the Church.” Putin’s solidifying tyranny heard their calls and criminalized insults to religious feelings. Meanwhile, Ukraine adhered to its pluralistic legacies. Its churches refused to engage in Russian-style culture wars, sticking instead to forgiveness and forbearance. Icons Axed, Freedoms Lost offers original theoretical and methodological perspectives on desecularization applicable far beyond the cases of Russia and Ukraine.
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Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism
Franz Jakubowski
Pluto Press, 2002
Ideology and Superstructure was written at a time - in the inter-war years - when Marxism existed almost entirely in its Stalinst form. Franz Jakubowski set out to reintroduce the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic into Marx's method and to elaborate the concept of praxis.
In the same period, only Lukacs and Korsch attempted to deal systemically with these problems, and it is they who are generally recognised as the main inspiration behind what is called Western Marxism, yet Franz Jakubowski is a key figure in the development of Marxist thought. And, unlike the others, Jakubowski was also an activist, and for this reason avoids the unnecessarily dense language of his fellow theoreticians.
Ideology and Superstructure is rare in that it successfully conveys complex problems in a simple and straightforward form. At a time when the literature on Marx has become excessively obscuranist, Jakubowski's work serves as a useful antidote, and is an ideal text for introducing novices to the basics of Marxist theory.
In the same period, only Lukacs and Korsch attempted to deal systemically with these problems, and it is they who are generally recognised as the main inspiration behind what is called Western Marxism, yet Franz Jakubowski is a key figure in the development of Marxist thought. And, unlike the others, Jakubowski was also an activist, and for this reason avoids the unnecessarily dense language of his fellow theoreticians.
Ideology and Superstructure is rare in that it successfully conveys complex problems in a simple and straightforward form. At a time when the literature on Marx has become excessively obscuranist, Jakubowski's work serves as a useful antidote, and is an ideal text for introducing novices to the basics of Marxist theory.
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If You See the Buddha
Studies in the Fiction of Ivan BuninThomas Gaiton Marullo
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In a 1994 American Scholar article, Andrew Wachtel wrote of Ivan Bunin: "[He] is undoubtedly the greatest Russian writer whom no one reads." With the collapse of communism, however, Bunin's works are undergoing a revival in both Russia and the West. As enthusiastic as readers and publishers have been, scholarship has not kept pace with this "rediscovery," in part due to the many contradictions in Bunin's writing, in part because much past criticism has been used to advanced the critic's own view of what they love or hate about "modern" life.
In If You See the Buddha, Thomas Gaiton Marullo begins addressing the lack of scholarship by establishing that Bunin was a thoroughly modern writer whose images and ideas were rooted more in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. But beyond that point, Marullo states that, of all the systems of belief that Bunin adopted and adapted throughout his career, it was his interest in Buddhism that best elucidates the dynamics of his writing. Key Buddhistic concepts figured prominently in Bunin's work. These ideas enabled him to make sense of his world and serves as the catalyst for an ars poetica that tempered his philosophical and aesthetic restiveness and contributed a sense of timelessness to work from both his prerevolutionary and émigré periods.
In If You See the Buddha, Thomas Gaiton Marullo begins addressing the lack of scholarship by establishing that Bunin was a thoroughly modern writer whose images and ideas were rooted more in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. But beyond that point, Marullo states that, of all the systems of belief that Bunin adopted and adapted throughout his career, it was his interest in Buddhism that best elucidates the dynamics of his writing. Key Buddhistic concepts figured prominently in Bunin's work. These ideas enabled him to make sense of his world and serves as the catalyst for an ars poetica that tempered his philosophical and aesthetic restiveness and contributed a sense of timelessness to work from both his prerevolutionary and émigré periods.
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Imagined Dialogues
Eastern European Literature in Conversation with American and English LiteratureGordana Crnkovic
Northwestern University Press, 1999
By conducting "imagined dialogues" between selected literary works--Eastern Europeans like Kiš and Borowski on one hand, American and English writers like Cage and Ishiguro on the other--this book proposes an effective new way of reading literature, one that goes beyond the narrowing categories of contemporary critical trends. A new perspective on each of the works emerges, as well as a heightened sense of the liberating power of literature.
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In Search of the True Russia
The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist DiscourseLyudmila Parts
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Russia's provinces have long held a prominent place in the nation's cultural imagination. Lyudmila Parts looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture, addressing notions of nationalism, authenticity, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postimperial identity.
Surveying a largely unexplored body of Russian journalism, literature, and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Parts finds that the harshest portrayals of the provinces arise within "high" culture. Popular culture, however, has increasingly turned from the newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow to celebrate the hinterlands as repositories of national traditions and moral strength. This change, she argues, has directed debate about Russia's identity away from its loss of imperial might and global prestige and toward a hermetic national identity based on the opposition of "us vs. us" rather than "us vs. them." She offers an intriguing analysis of the contemporary debate over what it means to be Russian and where "true" Russians reside.
Surveying a largely unexplored body of Russian journalism, literature, and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Parts finds that the harshest portrayals of the provinces arise within "high" culture. Popular culture, however, has increasingly turned from the newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow to celebrate the hinterlands as repositories of national traditions and moral strength. This change, she argues, has directed debate about Russia's identity away from its loss of imperial might and global prestige and toward a hermetic national identity based on the opposition of "us vs. us" rather than "us vs. them." She offers an intriguing analysis of the contemporary debate over what it means to be Russian and where "true" Russians reside.
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In Stalin's Time
Middleclass Values in Soviet FictionVera S. Dunham
Duke University Press, 1990
This new edition of In Stalin’s Time, which brings back into print Vera Dunham’s 1976 landmark study of popular fiction in the Soviet Union during the Stalin regime, is updated to include new material by the author and a new introduction by Richard Sheldon. Dunham describes how the middle-brow or postwar establishmentarian literature of the Stalinist period was a product of a “Big Deal” intended to propagate values and establish an alliance between the regime and the middle class. Both descriptive and analytical, Dunham’s complex picture of “high totalitarianism” not only reveals insights into the details of Soviet life but illuminates important theoretical questions about the role of literature in the political structure of Soviet society.
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In a Maelstrom
The History of Russian-Jewish Prose, 1860–1940Zsuzsa Hetényi
Central European University Press, 2008
The first concise history of Russian-Jewish literary prose, this book discusses Russian-Jewish literarature in four periods, analyzing the turning points (1881–82, 1897, 1917) and proposing that the selected epoch (1860–1940) represents a special strand that was unfairly left out of both Russian and Jewish national literatures. Based on theoretical sources on the subject, the book establishes the criteria of dual cultural affiliation, and in a survey of Russian-Jewish literature presents the pitfalls of assimilation and discusses different forms of anti-Semitism. After showing the oeuvre of 18 representative authors as a whole, the book analyzes a number of characteristic novels and short stories in terms of contemporary literary studies. Many texts discussed have not been reprinted since their first publication. The material offers indispensable information not only for comparative and literary studies but for multicultural, historical, ethnographic, Judaist, religious and linguistic investigations as well.
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Invented Truth
Soviet Reality and the Literary Imagination of Iurii TrifonovJosephine Woll
Duke University Press, 1991
In the "years of stagnation" before glasnost changed the cultural map of the Soviet Union, Iurii Trifonov (1926-1981) defied the rules of censorship. In Invented Truth, Josphine Woll examines how, within the repressive artistic and political constraints of the Soviet publishing world, Trifonov managed not only to write on controversial tropics such as Soviet history but even to achieve and maintain popular status in doing so.
Woll analyzes the aesthetic strategies Trifonov deployed to transmit his ideas and opinions to Soviet readers and elucidates the major themes of his late fiction: the moral climate that permitted the triumph of Stalinist immorality, the relationship between the Bolshevik revolutionary past and present-day Soviet amorality, and, finally, art's prismatic interpretation of reality. Drawing on both Western and Soviet scholarship, as well as interviews with many Soviet and emigre writers, literary critics, and personal acquaintances of Trifonov, Woll provides detailed background on the Soviet literary milieu and the rules governing literary production.
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Irina Nakhova
Museum on the EdgeJane A. Sharp
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Throughout her extensive career, Russian conceptual artist Irina Nakhova has frequently pushed the limits of what constitutes art and how we experience the art museum. One of her famous early pieces, for instance, transformed a room in her very own Moscow apartment into an art installation.
Released in conjunction with Nakhova’s first museum retrospective exhibition in the United States, this book includes many full-color illustrations of her work, spanning the entirety of her forty-year career and demonstrating her facility with a variety of media. It also includes essays by a variety of world-renowned curators and art historians, each cataloging Nakhova’s artistic innovations and exploring how she deals with themes of everyday life, memory, viewer engagement, and moral responsibility. It concludes with a new interview with Nakhova herself, giving new insight into her creative process and artistic goals. Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge provides a vivid look at the work of a visionary artist. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
Released in conjunction with Nakhova’s first museum retrospective exhibition in the United States, this book includes many full-color illustrations of her work, spanning the entirety of her forty-year career and demonstrating her facility with a variety of media. It also includes essays by a variety of world-renowned curators and art historians, each cataloging Nakhova’s artistic innovations and exploring how she deals with themes of everyday life, memory, viewer engagement, and moral responsibility. It concludes with a new interview with Nakhova herself, giving new insight into her creative process and artistic goals. Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge provides a vivid look at the work of a visionary artist. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
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Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism
Rebecca Jane Stanton
Northwestern University Press, 2012
In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessa—as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu—shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a place prepared for them in the Russian canon and fostered modes of storytelling that both reflected and resisted the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Stanton concludes with a rereading of Babel’s “autobiographical” stories and examines their legacy in post-Thaw works by Kataev, Olesha, and Konstantin Paustovsky.
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It Will Be Fun and Terrifying
Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet RussiaFabrizio Fenghi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin’s regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition.
To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement. He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions. His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a “counter-intelligensia.” This volume shows how certain forms of art can transform into political action through the creation of new languages, institutions, and modes of collective participation.
To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement. He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions. His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a “counter-intelligensia.” This volume shows how certain forms of art can transform into political action through the creation of new languages, institutions, and modes of collective participation.
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