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4 books match the query 'Russian language'

cover of Brodsky in English

Brodsky in English

Zakhar Ishov

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A deeply researched account of Joseph Brodsky’s evolution in English as a self-translator and a poet in translation

Joseph Brodsky’s translations of his own Russian-language poems into English “new originals” have been criticized for their “un-Englishness,” an appraisal based on a narrow understanding of translation itself. With this radical reassessment of the Nobel Prize winner’s self-translations, Zakhar Ishov proposes a fresh approach to poetry translation and challenges the assumption that poetic form is untranslatable. 

Brodsky in English draws on previously unexamined archival materials, including drafts and correspondence with translators and publishers, to trace the arc of Brodsky’s experience with the English language. Ishov shows how Brodsky’s belief in the intellectual continuity between his former life in the Soviet Union and his new career in the United States, including as Poet Laureate, anchored his insistence on maintaining the formal architecture of his poems in translation, locating the transmission of poetic meaning in the rhythms of language itself. This book highlights Brodsky’s place within the long history of the compromises translation must make between linguistic material and poetic process.
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cover of Configuring Topic and Focus in Russian

Configuring Topic and Focus in Russian

Tracy Holloway King

CSLI, 1995

This work examines word order. More accurately, it is the ordering of constituents that is discussed since prepositional phrases and most noun phrases form syntactic constituents and the encoding of topic and focus in Russian. As has long been observed, word order in Russian encodes specific discourse information: with neutral intonation, topics precede discourse-neutral constituents which precede foci. King extends this idea to show that word order encodes different types of topic and focus in a principled manner.
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cover of Emerging Writing Research from the Russian Federation

Emerging Writing Research from the Russian Federation

edited by L. Ashley Squires

University Press of Colorado, 2022

In the early 2010s, Russian institutions of higher education began responding to the need to internationalize Russian academia through faculty publications and academic mobility programs. The promotion of academic writing courses and writing centers based on international models has been a critical part of that effort, leading to the rapid growth of a field of teaching and scholarship that had not received much attention. This book explores these developments through contributions from individuals with experience in Russian higher education, who write about the rationale for importing and adapting international models of academic writing and rhetoric and composition, the role of the English and the Russian language in the development of this field, and the specific needs of faculty and student writers in Russia. We expect this book to be of interest to scholars investigating the internationalization of higher education, the role of English in the international dissemination of research, and programs developedspecifically for multilingual faculty writers, who are a core constituency for writing services in Russia.

This book is also available as an open access ebook through the WAC Clearinghouse.
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cover of Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture: A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953–1991

Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture

A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953–1991

Irina H. Corten

Duke University Press, 1992

Irina H. Corten's Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture is an experiment in what Soviet scholars call lingvostranovedenie—the study of a country and its culture through the peculiarities of its language. Not a conventional dictionary, Corten's lexicon is selective, offering a broad sampling of culturally significant words in the areas of politics, ideology, the economy, education, arts and letters, social problems and everyday life as well as language associated with the personalities and activities of individual Soviet leaders.
The entries are listed alphabetically in English transliteration followed by the Cyrillic, although readers familiar with Russian may prefer to use the Cyrillic alphabet listing included in this volume. In each entry, the author provides a succinct but full explanation of the term and, whenever possible, cross-references to other entries, authentic examples of its use, and samples of relevant Soviet jokes. A reader may approach the lexicon either sequentially or with the aid of a subject thesaurus that divides the material into specific topics. A listing of complementary sources of reference appears in a useful bibliography.
With this fascinating lexicon of "Sovietisms," Corten provides an invaluable and easily accessible medium for those general readers and scholars of the Russian language and Soviet culture interested in understanding contemporary Soviet life.

Selected entries from the Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture

Anekdótchik (anekdótchitsa) (cyrillic spelling) (n.)
1: A person who tells jokes (anekdoty); 2: coll. since the late Stalin era, a person arrested and given a prison sentence for the telling of political jokes. The phenomenon indicates the important role of the political joke in Soviet culture and, specifically, in the dissident movement. See iazychnik; sident.

The following jokes were popular during the Brezhnev era:
1. "Comrade Brezhnev, what is your hobby?"
"Collecting jokes about myself."
"And how many have you collected so far?"
"Two and a half labor camps."
2. Question: What is a marked-down joke?
Answer: A joke which, under Stalin, got you ten years in a labor camp, and now gets you only five.

egoístiki (cyrillic) (n.; pl.). Lit., little egotists; coll. since the 1970s referring to headsets worn by music lovers, especially teenage fans of rock music. The idea is that, by wearing headsets, one shuts out the world and becomes indifferent to everything except oneself.

zhrál'nia (cyrillic) (n.). Der. zhrat', to gorge, devour (vulg.); coll. since the 1970s denoting an eating establishment with inexpensive and often bad-tasting food. In the late 1980s, the term also has been applied to new fast-food restaurants which have been built in Soviet cities by Western concerns, for example, McDonald's. See amerikanka; stekliashka; stoiachka.

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