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From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture. Included are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature - including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn - alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of communism or the torture of the prison camps, they offer a wonderfully wide-ranging and exciting representation of one of the most vital and enduring forms of Russian literature.

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, the same theme of metamorphosis is prevalent in Russian literature and is examined here as a Russian theme, structuring principle and source of artistic identity. Barta examines the magical transformations depicted in the ancient classics and in the oral epic heritage resonate in Russian literature and film at the fin de siecle 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. Metamorphosis is examined in the works of prominent representatives of the divided Russian intelligentsia: the Symbolists; the most famous emigre writer, Nabokov; Olesha, the `fellow traveller' attempting to find his place in the Soviet state; the enthuiastic poet of the Bolshevik movement, Mayakovski; and finally, the great Russian film director, Sergei Eisenstein.

La culture russe peut etre qualifiee par l'attraction qu'exercent sur elle les phenomenes comme l'illusion, le masque et meme le trompe-l'oeil. L'A. nous donne les exemples de ces phenomenes depuis les regnes de Catherine la Grande et Pierre le Grand (villeges de Potemkine, proto-Disneylands de la noblesse russe), a travers l'ere sovietique (photos retouchees des dirigents sovietiques) jusqu'a l'ere post-communiste (avec les grands cetres commerciaux en tant que symboles de la nouvelle Russie capitaliste). L'A. s'efforce de nous donner quelques concepts afin de comprendre ou au moins identifier ces phenomenes

A collection of writings assessing the place of poetry in Russian culture. The book's 15 essays seek to illumine the age of Pushkin; the works of early 20th-century poets; and the field of contemporary Russian poetry. Some essays are devoted to individual poets, others take up broader trends.

It has been Gorky's great misfortune to be remembered mostly for the wrong things - for his apparent support of the Stalin regime; for his direct involvement in the foundation of the Union of Soviet Writers; and for the composition of the novel Mother (held up by generations of Soviet critics as the model for Socialist Realist fiction). With the advent of glasnost and perestroika, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet order itself, these conventional notions are at last becoming subject to a radical and necessary reappraisal in Gorky's native land. Yet, despite the steady stream of revisionist attitudes, the republication of controversial works long suppressed in Soviet Russia, and the publication of new material from the archives, the creation of a full biography is likely to remain a distant prospect for many years. The present volume has been conceived first of all as a sketch towards such a new biography. It contains 177 letters, written between 1889 and Gorky's death in 1936, and selected so as to allow Gorky to tell the story of his own life and reveal his hopes and fears, his observations and preoccupations over a literary career which spanned almost fifty years. Gorky's letters are of considerable interest on a number of levels: biographically; as representations of the development of Russian literature; in terms of the light they shed on many writers of the period (such as Lenin, Chekov, Tolstoy, and Pasternak) as well as major political figures (including Lenin and Stalin), and as period documents in their own right. Remarkable for its sheer immensity and the variety of its addressees, Gorky's correspondence provides a unique personal commentary on all aspects of Russian culture and society in the era of revolution, by one of the most fascinating figures of an extraordinary generation.

A study of the Virgin Mary and the ""saintly harlots"" - Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene - as a cultural paradigm encoded in Chekhov's prose. The author establishes the authority of the Marian paradigm in 19th-century Russian culture with an overview of salient religious and literary texts, then offers critical readings of more than 15 Chekhov stories, including key works such as ""Peasants"", ""Peasant Women"", and ""My Life"". De Sherbinin argues that Chekhov inverts and displaces the Christian meanings of Marian texts in order to reveal a vast array of problematized relationships to the canonized figures. This semiotic reading of Chekhov explores questions of female identity as it probes the mindset of Russian Orthodox popular culture.

To begin with, a brief story, perhaps strange for a Slavic and East European Journal review, but relevant to the subject at hand. Since I am neither a Russianist nor a Sovietist, but rather a scholar of the contemporary African and more broadly post-colonial worlds, my first voyage to Russia was both recent and brief. But despite that trip's brevity my time there revealed an oddly familiar occidentocentric, even colonized mindset. Of course St. Petersburg, the city I visited, is Russia's most Western location, and that city's quasi-namesake was Russia's great Westerizer, yet neither I nor my tour-group (a diverse set of academics from five continents) were prepared for the exo-centricity we met. The city itself is glorified as either Russia's Amsterdam or its Venice, and Peterhof its Versailles. Buildings are noted for their Italian or French architects, and restoration of the city's fine library was deemed crucial since it held manuscripts not by the likes of Dostoevsky or Pushkin, but Diderot and Voltaire. Such issues, I suspect, will be familiar to readers of the Slavic and East European Journal, as yet more evidence of the longstanding tug between East and West in Russian culture. They were familiar to me, however-an Africanist largely ignorant of Russia-for different reasons: because this exocentricity, this West-directed other-identification and part-denial of self was characteristic for me not of Russia but of nations and peoples in that great range of societies formerly termed "Third World" but now called "post-colonial," especially in those many places where Western European culture had been dominant or prestigious, had passed for universal, or had been imperfectly digested.

As Russia entered the modern age in the nineteenth century, many Russian intellectuals combined the study of European philosophy with a return to their own traditions, culminating in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and in the religious philosophy of their younger contemporary, Vladimir Soloviev. This book explores central issues of modern Russian religious thought by focusing on the work of Soloviev and three religious philosophers who further developed his ideas in the early twentieth century: P. A. Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, and S. L. Frank. The essays place these thinkers in the contexts of both Western philosophy and Eastern Orthodoxy, presenting a substantially new perspective on Russian religious thought. The work of these four philosophers, this volume demonstrates, influenced virtually all aspects of twentieth-century Russian culture, and indeed, many aspects of Soviet culture as well, but also represents a rich philosophical tradition devoted to issues of divinity, community, and humanity that transcend national boundaries and historical eras. Included in "Russian Religious Thought" is an introduction, brief biographical information on Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, and Frank, and an Afterword by scholar James Scanlan, who elaborates on the volume s aim to provide a thoughtful corrective, both to unexamined assumptions of past scholarship and to nationalist readings currently popular in post-Soviet Russia. "Russian religious philosophy, banned under the Soviets, has been marginalized in the Western academy as well. This interdisciplinary volume helps explain why this body of thought has remained for so long at the center of Russian culture." Caryl Emerson, Princeton University"

Before meeting Igor Stravinsky in 1921 in Paris, Vera Arturovna Sudeikin-Stravinsky (1888-1982) was already known as the "Muse of the Muses" in what had been the bohemian, intellectual life of St. Petersburg-Petrograd. Hers was the "Silver Age" of Russian culture, when symbolism reigned in the cabarets and the artistic process itself was a form of celebration. As the habitues of this world fled the Bolsheviks, Vera, an artist and writer in her own right, managed to preserve their heritage in an extraordinary literary production: an album containing poems, sketches, fragments of music, and other dedications by some of the most influential Russian cultural figures of the day. The Album, reproduced here for the first time, is both a record of a cultural diaspora and a monument to the Russian fin de siecle. In 1917 Vera fled to the south of Russia with her then-husband Sergei Sudeikin, a renowned painter and stage designer for the Ballets Russes. They traveled three years throughout the Crimea, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, organizing artistic gatherings at many of their stops. Vera recorded her impressions of the journey and along the way invited her famous friends to make creative offerings to her Album. Together they produced a "literature of loss"--of city and country, of childhood, of an entire era. The material, much of which has never been published, includes poems by Osip Mandelstam, Konstantin Balmont, and Mikhail Kuzmin; musical fragments by Vladimir Pol and Igor Stravinsky; and drawings and watercolors by Boris Grigoriev, Lado Gudiashvili, Sergei Sudeikin, the Zdanevich brothers, and Vera herself. The Album survived war, revolution, and exile, but it was never published until now. In this edition, which reproduces every page of the Album in full color, John Bowlt uses Vera's diaries along with many other sources to explain the stories behind the entries. The biographical information, dates, and places, all accompanying each entry, will help today's readers form a vivid picture of a fascinating era, and an understanding of an extraordinary woman and the cultural liaisons that made up her world.

connections between linguistic units and their extensive historical, literary, and religious associations, bringing a nearly Futurist verbal inventiveness to the more traditional poetic exploitation of cultural subtexts. Personal names are no exception to this rule. Other poets' names initiate and structure her addresses to them-she structures poetic meaning around the clicking, splashing or trigger-cocking sound of Blok (SiP 1:227), the ecstatic "Ax" of Axmatova (SiP 1:232) and the runbling "Er" of Erenburg (SiP II:160).1 Her own name, Marina, repeatedly provokes poetic treatments of its etymology and associations.2 Cvetaeva exploits her own name's poetic and mythological significance, bringing into play both its etymological and its historical and literary planes of meaning. Another significant level of naming works to illuminate Cvetaeva's speaking selves through names that are not strictly speaking her own. This study will explore two examples, the names Ivan and Marija (equivalent to the English John and Mary), and their function in Cvetaeva's writing. These names have tremendous resonance in Russian culture, as indeed in all Christian traditions: they spring from and refer back to central figures in the Gospels. Using them lets the poet claim creative power within Russian cultural and poetic traditions which insist on strictly polarized genders and value female silence. Gospel names cast their light onto other literary and historical figures who bear them, intiating patterns of relationship and furthering the poet's exploration of far-reaching identities. Finally, "Ivan" and "Marija" are also the names of Cvetaeva's parents, Ivan Vladimirovic Cvetaev and Marija Aleksandrovna Mejn. Therefore her poetic treatment of these two names plumbs her personal, family heritage while it works to define and refine her relationship to the fundamental narrative of Western

This collection of essays addresses post-1985 Russian culture. Based on papers presented at a conference on contemporary Russian culture, held at the School of Slavonic Studies and at the British Film Institute in London in 1993, this book places particular emphasis on visual culture, especially film and television. Essays include studies of television coverage of the August putsch, Russian cultural politics since perestroika, Muratova's films and Govorukhin's documentaries. This work features contributions from leading Russian scholars and cultural theorists, including Helen Goscilo, Katerina Clark and Mikhail Iampolski.

Introduction Y.Slezkine & G.Diment - Savage Christians or Unorthodox Russians: The Missionary Dilemma in Siberia Y.Slezkine, - Avvakum and the Genesis of Siberian Literature B.T.Holl - Exiled from Siberia: The Construction of Siberian Experience by Early Nineteenth Century Irkutsk Writers: G.Diment - Paradoxical Perceptions of Siberia: Patrician and Plebeian Images up to the Mid-1880s J.R.Gibson 'Vo Glubine Sibirskikh Rud': Siberia and the Myth of Exile H.Murav - The Regionalist Conception of Siberia, 1860-1920 S.Watrous - Lenin and the Siberian Peasant Insurrections N.G.O.Pereira - Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma L.Toker - Vasilii Shukshin and His Siberia J.Givens - Stereotyping Interethnic Communication: The Siberian Native in Soviet Literature J.Nichols - The Divided Self: Yuri Rytkheu and Contemporary Chukchi Literature A.Barker - Siberia Hot and Cold: Reconstructing the Image of Siberian Indigenous People B.Grant - A Paradise Lost? Siberia and its Writers, 1960-1990 D.Gillespie - Index