Literature

Carpatho-Rusyn literature, which dates back to the sixteenth century, emerged as a distinct creative movement only after the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, where the ancestral Rusyn homeland straddles the borders of five countries: Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. For much of the twentieth century, however, Rusyns did not officially exist, since Soviet-dominated governments stubbornly denied the existence...

Part history and part anthology, this close study of contemporary journal articles, letters, and poetry shows the extraordinary tension of the alternately competing and coalescing drives of nationalism and feminism among the Slovaks in Austria-Hungary. Women co-opted into the national movement learned to enlarge and internalize the new opportunities given them by national needs. The desperate position of the Slovaks...

From the introduction: The rituals of wedding, delivery, and funeral provide us with an insight into how multiple strains of Russian culture from the October Revolution to the present have managed to coexist and evolve. All three rituals exhibit traces of the nineteenth-century rural folk behaviors considered to be essential for proper transition into a new social status. In addition,...

The ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity, the perceived distance from Western culture as well as linguistic barriers make access to South Slavic folk cultures difficult. In spite of that there is a surprisingly large number of publications in Western languages, but many of them are hardly known even to specialists. The bibliography puts together the extant scholarly literature on...

Treats the central concerns and patterns of the literary prose of Fedor Sologub by examining the crucial role which children play in the writer's fictive universe. Treated here are many of the best short stories, the fairy tales, and most of the novels (Bad Dreams, The Petty Demon, A Legend in Creation) which this leading decadent-symbolist author wrote between 1894...

This study is chiefly concerned with the organization of the Italian Poems into a coherent meaningful structure. It demonstrates how the very order of the poems was determined by a conception of evolution which paralleled that of Blok's total oeuvre. Studied in this way, there emerges from the cycle a pattern charged with meaning and grounded in much larger issues...