Literature

The Russian Poet and Philosopher Josephine Pasternak (1900–93) published two collections of verse during her lifetime, and her philosophical treatise Indefinability was brought out posthumously in 1998. Josephine belonged to a famous Moscow Family: her older brother was the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak and her father Leonid was a well-known early 20th-century painter. She left Russia in 1921 to...

Over the centuries Bulgaria has been many things: a brilliant medieval empire (even two!), an abject, all-but-forgotten Ottoman province, a struggling kingdom, a docile satellite and now a democratic member of NATO ad a new member in the European Union as of 2007. Its writers have enormously rich material with which to work in chronicling their national life, and their...

This omnibus volume collects under a single cover the entire oeuvre of writings by Jan Louis Perkowski on the vampire theme in mythology and folklore, including his three previously published monographs (Vampires, Dwarves, and Witches Among the Ontario Kashubs, 1972; Vampires of the Slavs, 1976; and The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism, 1989), in addition to 18 previously uncollected...

Alexander Galich, born Alexander Arkadievich Ginzburg in 1918 ("Galich" is a literary pseudoym he assumed in 1947), is best known as the cult author of poem-songs surreptitiosly disseminated throughout the Soviet Union in the millions as part of the magnitizdat phenomenon. Dress Rehearsal was written by Alexander Galich in 1973, only a year before his forced emigration from the Soviet...

This Festschrift is presented as a mark of esteem and appreciation to Anna Lisa Crone in recognition of her considerable contributions to Slavic Studies as a scholar, teacher, dissertation adviser, and colleague. In three books and numerous articles, Professor Crone has demonstrated her ability to envision first, how literary works are made, and second, how that craftedness contributes to our...

Vladimir Makanin impels the Russian tradition at once in two established directions: back to its sympathy for the "little people" in al their social exigencies and forward into a new life fraught with doubt, bad memories (and bad teeth), and yet the need for self assertion and new forms of expression. In terms of fiction, his works, whatever the precise...

День без вранья (A Day without Lying) draws readers into the everyday existence of a twenty-something Muscovite who has decided to live a single day without telling any lies. Yet the events of this day - from his unruly French class to the evening he spends with his girlfriend and her parents - seriously challenge his resolve to avoid lying....

Yiddish Modernism: Studies in Twentieth-Century Eastern European Jewish Culture is a presentation of what enters into the construction of Yiddish modernism, with “Yiddish modernism” being a working term. In 25 articles published over the course of more than three decades of research, Seth L. Wolitz engagingly illustrates the renaissance of Jewish plastic arts, literature, poetry, drama, and music through a...

The poetry of Georgia, a country of ancient culture in the South Caucasus, is the crown jewel of its exceptionally rich literary heritage. Secular poetry, having emerged from the fusion of folk poems and religious hymns and homilies of the early Christian era over a thousand years ago, remained a dominant genre of Georgia literature well into the twentieth century....

One hundred fifty years after his birth, Anton Chekhov remains the most beloved Russian playwright in his own country, and in the English-speaking world he is second only to Shakespeare. His stories, deceptively simple, continue to serve as models for writers in many languages. In this volume, Carol Apollonio and Angela Brintlinger have brought together leading scholars from Russia and...