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386 books match the query 'Russia' and 8 start with p

cover of Peltse and Pentameron

Peltse and Pentameron

Volodymyr Dibrova

Northwestern University Press, 1996

In these two novellas, Volodymyr Dibrova tells the story of how the Soviet system was sustained by individuals who never truly believed in it, but simply lacked the courage to oppose it.

Peltse portrays the formation of an average apparatchik. Both funny and alarming, it provides a psychological portrait of an individual trapped in a system he simultaneously dislikes and depends upon for survival. Pentameron tells the story of one day in the life of five colleagues at a Soviet research institute. Each is dissatisfied, yet all are trapped in and by a system that has taken away their ability to act decisively.
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cover of Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921

Petersburg/Petersburg

Novel and City, 1900–1921

Olga Matich

University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

Since its founding three hundred years ago, the city of Saint Petersburg has captured the imaginations of the most celebrated Russian writers, whose characters map the city by navigating its streets from the aristocratic center to the gritty outskirts. While Tsar Peter the Great planned the streetscapes of Russia’s northern capital as a contrast to the muddy and crooked streets of Moscow, Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1916), a cornerstone of Russian modernism and the culmination of the “Petersburg myth” in Russian culture, takes issue with the city’s premeditated and supposedly rational character in the early twentieth century.
    “Petersburg”/Petersburg studies the book and the city against and through each other. It begins with new readings of the novel—as a detective story inspired by bomb-throwing terrorists, as a representation of the aversive emotion of disgust, and as a painterly avant-garde text—stressing the novel’s phantasmagoric and apocalyptic vision of the city. Taking a cue from Petersburg’s narrator, the rest of this volume (and the companion Web site, stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/) explores the city from vantage points that have not been considered before—from its streetcars and iconic art-nouveau office buildings to the slaughterhouse on the city fringes. From poetry and terrorist memoirs, photographs and artwork, maps and guidebooks of that period, the city emerges as a living organism, a dreamworld in flux, and a junction of modernity and modernism.

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cover of Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1885-1913

Pioneers for Profit

Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1885-1913

John P. McKay

University of Chicago Press, 1970

Foreign investment increased from 17 percent of the capital of industrial corporations in Imperial Russia in 1880 to 47 percent in 1914, coinciding with the rapid development of Russian industrialization before World War I. John McKay's study, based largely on intensive research in numerous archives and utilizing many previously unexplored private business records, is the first detailed analysis of the impact of foreign enterprise on Russian industry during this period. His conclusions are significant for historians, economists, and those interested in the development of modern industrial society.
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cover of Plotting History: The Russian Historical Novel in the Imperial Age

Plotting History

The Russian Historical Novel in the Imperial Age

Dan Ungurianu

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Balanced precariously between fact and fiction, the historical novel is often viewed with suspicion. Some have attacked it as a mongrel form, a “bastard son” born of “history’s flagrant adultery with imagination.” Yet it includes some of the most celebrated achievements of Russian literature, with Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and scores of other writers contributing to this tradition.
    Dan Ungurianu’s Plotting History traces the development of the Russian historical novel from its inception in the romantic era to the emergence of Modernism on the eve of the Revolution. Organized historically and thematically, the study is focused on the cultural paradigms that shaped the evolution of the genre and are reflected in masterpieces such as The Captain’s Daughter and War and Peace. Ungurianu examines the variety of approaches by which Russian writers combined fact with fiction and explores the range of subjects that inspired the Russian historical imagination.

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

“Ungurianu has produced a most valuable work for literary scholars.”—Andrew M. Drozd, Slavic and East European Journal

“[Ungurianu’s] overwhelming knowledge, impeccable documentation, erudite notes, and valuable addenda make for a treasure house of information and keen analysis. . . . Essential.”—Choice

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cover of Policemen of the Tsar: Local Police in an Age of Upheaval

Policemen of the Tsar

Local Police in an Age of Upheaval

Robert J. Abbott

Central European University Press, 2022

Founded by Peter the Great in 1718, Russia’s police were key instruments of tsarist power. In the reign of Alexander II (1855-1881), local police forces took on new importance. The liberation of 23 million serfs from landlord control, growing fear of crime, and the terrorist violence of the closing years challenged law enforcement with new tasks that made worse what was already a staggering burden. (“I am obliged to inform Your Imperial Highness that the police often fail to carry out their assignments and, when they do execute them, they do so poorly because of their moral corruption…”) This book describes the regime’s decades-long struggle to reform and strengthen the police. The author reviews the local police’s role and performance in the mid-nineteenth century and the implications of the largely unsuccessful effort to transform them. From a longer-term perspective, the study considers how the police’s systemic weaknesses undermined tsarist rule, impeded a range of liberalizing reforms, perpetuated reliance on the military to maintain law and order, and gave rise to vigilante justice.

While its primary focus is on European Russia, the analysis also covers much of the imperial periphery, discussing the police systems in the Baltic Provinces, Congress Poland, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia.

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cover of Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade

Post-Post-Soviet?

Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade

Edited by Marta Dziewanska, Ekaterina Degot, and Ilya Budratskis

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2013

By placing emerging artists in their political and social contexts, this collection attempts to confront the new activist scene that has arisen in the Russian art world during the past years. The recent explosion of protests in Russia—often with their very purpose being to decry the lack of artistic freedom—is a symptom of a fundamental change in culture heralded by Vladimir Putin’s first election. This shift was precipitated by the change to a highly commercial, isolated world, financed and informed by oligarchs. In response, the Russian contemporary art scene has faced shrinking freedom yet an even more urgent need for expression. While much of what is emerging from the Moscow art scene is too new to be completely understood, the editors of this volume seek to bring to light the important work of Russian artists today and to explicate the political environment that has given rise to such work. Post-Post-Soviet? will feature both criticism by writers and scholars, as well as dialogues with artists. Contributors include Boris Kagarlitsky, Ekaterina Degot, Keti Chukhrov, Boris Buden, Artur Zmijewski, and others.

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cover of Postcards from the Russian Revolution

Postcards from the Russian Revolution

Edited by the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008

The tumultuous political events that swept Russia in the early twentieth century sent powerful ripples around the world. The Bolshevik revolutionaries and activists had sympathizers among Americans and Europeans alike, and one notable way they exercised their support was through artfully created postcards. This remarkable volumepresents for the first time a newly unearthed collection of those cards that recount the 1917 Russian Revolution in a novel way.

            The postcards originated not only from Russia, but also from Germany, the United States, Belgium, and France, and they reflect their diverse origins in the rich array of artistic styles employed to create them. Whether simply drawn, hand-painted, or mass-printed, the cards present compelling and complex images of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the people who were enmeshed in it. The cards serve as concise yet powerful artistic documents of Russian history and culture, as they display bloody and graphic street scenes, rare pictures of lesser-known revolutionary leaders, satirical sketches of Russian rulers, portraits of the royal family, illustrations of palaces and institutional buildings, and depictions of pivotal events leading up to the Revolution such as the 1905 assassination of Grand Duke Alexander. Also included in this fascinating visual narrative are cards depicting crucial events from the aftermath of the Revolution, including the great famine of 1921 and public celebrations of the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

            An unprecedented and arresting exploration of the Russian Empire in its death throes, Postcards from the Russian Revolution reveals a wholly new and vibrant perspective on one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century.
 
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cover of Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism

Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism

Emily Wang

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

In December 1825, a group of liberal aristocrats, officers, and intelligentsia mounted a coup against the tsarist government of Russia. Inspired partially by the democratic revolutions in the United States and France, the Decembrist movement was unsuccessful; however, it led Russia’s civil society to new avenues of aspiration and had a lasting impact on Russian culture and politics. Many writers and thinkers belonged to the conspiracy while others, including the poet Alexander Pushkin, were loosely or ambiguously affiliated. While the Decembrist movement and Pushkin’s involvement has been well covered by historians, Emily Wang takes a novel approach, examining the emotional and literary motivations behind the movement and the dramatic, failed coup. 

Through careful readings of the literature of Pushkin and others active in the northern branch of the Decembrist movement, such as Kondraty Ryleev, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Fyodor Glinka, Wang traces the development of “emotional communities” among the members and adjacent writers. This book illuminates what Wang terms “civic sentimentalism”: the belief that cultivating noble sentiments on an individual level was the key to liberal progress for Russian society, a core part of Decembrist ideology that constituted a key difference from their thought and Pushkin’s. The emotional program for Decembrist community members was, in other ways, a civic program for Russia as a whole, one that they strove to enact by any means necessary. 
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