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424 books match the query 'Russian & Soviet' and 16 start with m

cover of Made Under Pressure: Literary Translation in the Soviet Union, 1960–1991

Made Under Pressure

Literary Translation in the Soviet Union, 1960–1991

Natalia Kamovnikova

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

During the Cold War, determined translators and publishers based in the Soviet Union worked together to increase the number of foreign literary texts available in Russian, despite fluctuating government restrictions. Based on extensive interviews with literary translators, Made Under Pressure offers an insider's look at Soviet censorship and the role translators played in promoting foreign authors—including figures like John Fowles, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner.

Natalia Kamovnikova chronicles the literary translation process from the selection of foreign literary works to their translation, censorship, final approval, and publication. Interviews with Soviet translators of this era provide insight into how the creative work of translating and the practical work of publishing were undertaken within a politically restricted environment, and recall the bonds of community and collaboration that they developed.
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cover of Making Modernism Soviet: The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918-1928

Making Modernism Soviet

The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918-1928

Pamela Kachurin

Northwestern University Press, 2013

Making Modernism Soviet provides a new understanding of the ideological engagement of Russian modern artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vera Ermolaeva with the political and social agenda of the Bolsheviks in the chaotic years immediately following the Russian Revolution. Focusing on the relationship between power brokers and cultural institutions under conditions of state patronage, Pamela Kachurin lays to rest the myth of the imposition of control from above upon a victimized artistic community. Drawing on extensive archival research, she shows that Russian modernists used their positions within the expanding Soviet arts bureaucracy to build up networks of like-minded colleagues. Their commitment to one another and to the task of creating a socially transformative visual language for the new Soviet context allowed them to produce some of their most famous works of art. But it also contributed to the "Sovietization" of the art world that eventually sealed their fate.
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cover of Mandelstam, Blok, and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism

Mandelstam, Blok, and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism

Stuart Goldberg

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

“Mandelstam had no teacher,” marveled Anna Akhmatova, reflecting on his early maturity and singularity. But Mandelstam himself spoke of the need and even duty to study a poet’s literary roots. So how did this consummately complex, compelling, multi-resonant poet navigate and exploit the burden of the Russian Symbolist movement from which he emerged? How did this process change and augment his poetry?

Through a series of illuminating readings, Stuart Goldberg explores the ongoing role that the poetry of Russian Symbolism played in Osip Mandelstam’s creative life, laying bare the poet’s productive play with distance and immediacy in his assimilation of the Symbolist heritage. At the same time, Mandelstam, Blok, and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism presents the first coherent narrative of the poet’s fraught relationship with Alexander Blok, the most powerful poetic voice among the Symbolists. This dialogue, which was largely one-sided, extended beyond poetic intertext into the realms of poetics, charisma, and personality.
 
Goldberg’s study pushes theoretical boundaries, exploring the juncture between pragmatics and intertext, adapting and challenging Bloom’s anxiety of influence theory, and, ultimately, tracing a shift in the nature of sincerity and authenticity that divided poetic generations.
 
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cover of Mapping Warsaw: The Spatial Poetics of a Postwar City

Mapping Warsaw

The Spatial Poetics of a Postwar City

Ewa Wampuszyc

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Mapping Warsaw is an interdisciplinary study that combines urban studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, history, literature, and photography. It examines Warsaw's post-World War II reconstruction through images and language.

Juxtaposing close readings of photo books, socialist-era newsreels called the Polska Kronika Filmowa, the comedies of Leonard Buczkowski and Jan Fethke, the writing and films of Tadeusz Konwicki, and a case study on the Palace of Culture and Science—a "gift" from none other than Stalin—this study investigates the rhetorical and visual, rather than physical, reconstruction of Warsaw in various medias and genres. 

Ewa Wampuszyc roots her analysis in the historical context of the postwar decade and shows how and why Poland's capital became an essential part of a propaganda program inspired by communist ideology and the needs of a newly established socialist People's Republic. Mapping Warsaw demonstrates how physical space manifests itself in culture, and how culture, history, and politics leave an indelible mark on places. It points out ways in which we take for granted our perception of space and the meanings we assign to it.
 
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cover of Mariupol 2013-2022: Stories of Mobilization and Resistance

Mariupol 2013-2022

Stories of Mobilization and Resistance

Hana Josticova

Central European University Press, 2024

The chapters in this book represent successive phases of one story – that of Mariupol, formerly Ukraine’s tenth largest city, and the second largest in the Donbas region. The author, a young Slovak academic, conducted her ethnographic fieldwork in this coastal town between November 2018 and August 2021. She was one of the last academics to do research in Mariupol before its invasion and eventual occupation by Russia.

During these years, Hana Jošticová was overwhelmed by acts of mobilization and resistance that went in opposite directions: support for a Western direction of Ukraine’s future, and support for the status quo that the victory of the Euromaidan seemed to threaten.

She noted the sequence of events presented in the media and through the lens of individual frames and narratives. Her book is a collection and interpretation of memories and testimonies from both sides: those who actively resisted Russian influence; and those who sparked their own revolution, the ‘Russian Spring.’ Her focus is on self-mobilized individuals who resorted to action outside of established organizational structures spontaneously, autonomously, without resources and guarantees of safety. Her evidence indicates that popular support for the Russian Spring had less to do with Russia than with the social, economic, or cultural characteristics of the Donetsk region.

Years of immersive research convinced the author that individuals are as important as masses, ideas are as powerful as material resources, and beliefs and emotions are as critical as weapons.

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cover of Master and Margarita: A Critical Companion

Master and Margarita

A Critical Companion

Laura Weeks

Northwestern University Press, 1996

An edited collection, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, that guides readers through Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical masterpiece. The introduction places The Master and Margarita and Bulgakov within Russian history and literature, and essays by prominent scholars offer opinion and analysis of the novel's structure, its place in current criticism, its connection to Goethe, and its symbolism and motifs. There is also an abundance of primary source material, including an excerpt from an earlier version of the novel, and related correspondence and diary entries.
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cover of Mayakovsky: A Biography

Mayakovsky

A Biography

Bengt Jangfeldt

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Few poets have led lives as tempestuous as that of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Born in 1893 and dead by his own hand in 1930, Mayakovsky packed his thirty-six years with drama, politics, passion, and—most important—poetry. An enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution and the emerging Soviet State, Mayakovsky was championed by Stalin after his death and enshrined as a quasi-official Soviet poet, a position that led to undeserved neglect among Western literary scholars even as his influence on other poets has remained powerful.
 
With Mayakovsky, Bengt Jangfeldt offers the first comprehensive biography of Mayakovsky, revealing a troubled man who was more dreamer than revolutionary, more political romantic than hardened Communist. Jangfeldt sets Mayakovsky’s life and works against the dramatic turbulence of his times, from the aesthetic innovations of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde to the rigidity of Socialist Realism and the destruction of World War I to the violence—and hope—of the Russian Revolution, through the tightening grip of Stalinist terror and the growing disillusion with Russian communism that eventually led the poet to take his life.
 
Through it all is threaded Mayakovsky’s celebrated love affair with Lili Brik and the moving relationship with Lili’s husband, Osip, along with a brilliant depiction of the larger circle of writers and artists around Mayakovsky, including Maxim Gorky, Viktor Shklovsky, Alexander Rodchenko, and Roman Jakobson. The result is a literary life viewed in the round, enabling us to understand the personal and historical furies that drove Mayakovsky and generated his still-startling poetry.
 
Illustrated throughout with rare images of key characters and locations, Mayakovsky is a major step in the revitalization of a crucial figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

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cover of Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929

Men without Women

Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929

Eliot Borenstein

Duke University Press, 2001

In Men without Women Eliot Borenstein examines the literature of the early Soviet period to shed new light on the iconic Russian concept of comradeship. By analyzing a variety of Russian writers who span the ideological spectrum, Borenstein provides an illuminating reading of the construction of masculinity in Soviet culture. In each example he identifies the replacement of blood ties with ideology and the creation of a social order in which the family has been supplanted by the collective.
In such works as Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel, Envy by Yuri Olesha, and Chevengur by Andrei Platonov women are either absent or transformed into bodiless abstractions. Their absence, claims Borenstein, reflects the masculine values that are hallmarks of the post-revolutionary era: production rather than reproduction, participation in history rather than domestic ahistoricity, heavy industry, construction, and struggle. He identifies in this literature groups of “men without women” replacing the family, even while the metaphor of family is used as an organizing feature of their recurring revolutionary missions. With the passage of time, these characters’ relationships—just as those in the Soviet culture of the time—begin to resemble the family structure that was originally rejected and destroyed, with one important exception: the new “families” had no place for women. According to Borenstein, this masculinist myth found its most congenial audience during the early period of communism, but its hostility to women and family ties could not survive into the Stalinist era when women, home, and family were no longer seen as antithetical to socialism.
Drawing on the theory and writings of Levi-Strauss, Girard, Sedgwick, and others, Men Without Women will be of interest to students and scholars of Slavic literature and history as well as specialists in literary theory and gender studies.
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cover of Metamorphosis in Russian Modernism

Metamorphosis in Russian Modernism

Peter I. Barta

Central European University Press, 2000

Modern Russia has been shaped by Peter the Great's sudden attempt to transform it into a European country. Since shapeshifting and identity are so closely linked in Russian history, it is hardly surprising that metamorphosis is a prevalent - albeit hitherto neglected - theme in Russian literature. Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism provides the first detailed account of metamorphosis as a Russian theme, structuring principle, and source of artistic identity. Barta examines how the magical transformations depicted in the ancient classics and in the oral epic heritage resonate in Russian literature and film at the fin de siècle and the early decades of the twentieth century - a period of dynamic change in Russian culture. Two hundred years after Peter's forceful westernization and facing its second crucial transformation in 1917, Russia witnessed the decay of classic realism and positivism and the rise of irrational philosophies, psychoanalysis, artistic experimentation, Marxism, as well as the birth of the new genre of film. This in-depth volume examines metamorphosis in the works of prominent representatives of the divided Russian intelligentsia: the Symbolists; the most famous émigré writer, Nabokov; Olesha, the 'fellow traveller' attempting to find his place in the Soviet state; the enthusiastic poet of the Bolshevik movement, Maiakovskii; and finally, Russia's greatest film director, Sergei Eisenstein. The volume directs attention to the fact that Russia itself is a metamorph. The shapeshifter always retains features of previous identities and is sometimes capable of returning into previous forms; whether today's Russia will want to, or be able to do so, remains to be seen. It is futile to attempt to try to understand this civilisation - let alone predict its future - without considering the intellectual, social and emotional reasons why it is not at rest with itself. It is to this end that this volume hopes to make a contribution.
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cover of Metapoesis: The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov

Metapoesis

The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov

Michael C. Finke

Duke University Press, 1995

Readers have been schooled to see nineteenth-century Russian literature as the summit of social and psychological realism. But in the work of writers from Pushkin to Chekhov, Michael C. Finke discloses a pervasive self-referentiality, a running commentary on the literary conventions these texts seem so wholly to embody. Metapoesis examines how—and more importantly, why—a series of major Russian authors spanning the nineteenth century inscribed commentary on their own poetics into their works of drama, narrative poetry, and fiction. As he explores the process of metapoesis in these works, Finke reveals its communicative function in its time and its interpretive value in our own.
Jakobsonian poetics provides the framework for this approach, though Finke also draws freely upon a number of contemporary literary theorists. After elucidating the meaning of metapoesis in works by Pushkin, Gogol, and Chernyshevsky, he reveals its covert functioning in such masterpieces of realism as Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Chekhov’s "The Steppe." The result is a new interpretation and deeper understanding of these particular works, which in turn reorient our understanding of linguistic and literary "codes" and of the Russian literary tradition itself.
Of special interest to scholars of Russian literature, Metapoesis will also appeal to a broad range of readers and students of comparative literature, literary theory, and poetics.
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cover of Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973

Mikhail Bakhtin

The Duvakin Interviews, 1973

Slav N Gratchev

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views:  on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Bakhtin's passion for poetic language and his insights into music also come as a surprise to readers of his essays on the novel. One remarkable thread running through the conversations is Bakhtin's love of poetry, masses of which he knew by heart in several languages. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of Milosz and the Problem of Evil

Milosz and the Problem of Evil

Lukasz Tischner; Translated from the Polish by Stanley Bill

Northwestern University Press, 2015

While scholars have chronicled Czesław Miłosz’s engagement with religious belief, no previous book-length treatment has focused on his struggles with theodicy in both poetry and thought. Miłosz wrestled with the problem of believing in a just God given the powerful evidence to the contrary in the natural world as he observed it and in the horrors of World War II and its aftermath in Poland. Rather than attempt to survey Miłosz’s vast oeuvre, Łukasz Tischner focuses on several key works—The Land of Ulro, The World, The Issa Valley, A Treatise on Morals, A Treatise on Poetry, and From the Rising of the Sun—carefully tracing the development of Miłosz’s moral arguments, especially in relation to the key texts that influenced him, among them the Bible, the Gnostic writings, and the works of Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Scho­penhauer. The result is a book that examines Miłosz as both a thinker and an artist, shedding new light on all aspects of his oeuvre.

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cover of Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel

Mimetic Lives

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel

Chloë Kitzinger

Northwestern University Press, 2021

What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel explores this question through readings of major works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Working at the height of the Russian realist tradition, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky each discovered unprecedented techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion that Chloë Kitzinger calls mimetic life—the reader’s sense of a character’s autonomous, embodied existence. At the same time, both authors tested the practical limits of that illusion by extending it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds: philosophy, history, journalism, theology, myth.
 
Through new readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and other novels, Kitzinger traces a productive tension between mimetic characterization and the author’s ambition to transform the reader. She shows how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky create lifelike characters and why the dream of carrying the illusion of “life” beyond the novel consistently fails. Mimetic Lives challenges the contemporary truism that novels educate us by providing enduring models for the perspectives of others, with whom we can then better empathize. Seen close, the realist novel’s power to create a world of compelling fictional persons underscores its resources as a form for thought and its limits as a direct source of spiritual, social, or political change.
 
Drawing on scholarship in Russian literary studies as well as the theory of the novel, Kitzinger’s lucid work of criticism will intrigue and challenge scholars working in both fields. 
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cover of Monuments Askew: An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor

Monuments Askew

An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor

Maria Corrigan

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Monuments Askew: An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor presents a cultural history of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), an avant-garde collective of Ukrainian artists whose unique approach to monumental history generated a new kind of cinema for a modernizing Soviet era. Often lost in the shuffle of this period, FEKS’s vibrant and experimental cinematic output initiated a youthful and cheeky overhaul of Soviet revolutionary culture. Monuments Askew reveals the foundational role of this understudied group of artists—including Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg—and uses their own theoretical contributions to undo the “foundations” of our understanding of Soviet media and arts. As a counter to a solely cinema-focused conceptualization of this era, Corrigan develops a transnational media theory of eccentricity. Defining eccentric circles as warped, irregular orbits that force a realignment of centers, Monuments Askew shows how FEKS’s body of work inspires an eccentric realignment of the pillars of Soviet visual culture, and indeed of monumentality itself.
 
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cover of Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Mothers and Daughters

Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Barbara Alpern Engel

Northwestern University Press, 2000

The first psychosocial study of the female intelligentsia in Russia, Mothers and Daughters explains how and why women radicals of the nineteenth century diverged from their male counterparts, describes the forces that led women to rebel, and discusses their legacy to future generations. Throughout, Engel brings nineteenth-century women to life, humanizing history as she presents a case study of how the personal became political in a time and place different from our own.
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cover of My Sister Life and The Zhivago Poems

My Sister Life and The Zhivago Poems

Boris Pasternak, Translated from the Russian by James E. Falen

Northwestern University Press, 2012

Boris Pasternak is best known in the West for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, whereas in Russia he is most celebrated as a poet. The two poetry collections offered here in translation are chronological and thematic bookends, and they capture Pasternak’s abiding and powerful vision of life: his sense of its beauty and terror, its precariousness for the individual, and its persistence in time—that vitality of being with which he is on familiar and familial terms.

In the early work My Sister Life, which commemorates the year 1917, Pasternak, then in his late twenties, found his poetic voice. The book would go on to become one of the most influential collections of Rus­sian poetry of the twentieth century. “The Poems of Yury Zhivago” are a part of the poet’s famous novel, Dr. Zhivago, whose title might be rendered in English as “Doctor Life.” These later lyrics are a kind of summing up that reflect, from the perspective of age and approaching death, upon the accumulated experience of a contemplative life amid turbulent and terrifying times.

Falen’s fresh new translations of these poems capture their expres­sion of the beauty and the joy, the terror and the pain, of what it is to be alive . . . and to die.

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