Literature

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 the West for a wide-ranging conversation about Chekhov’s work and legacy. Considering issues as broad as space and time and as tightly focused as the word, these are twenty-one exciting new essays for the twenty-first century. An avid Chekhov fan, Carol Apollonio has published many articles and reviews on his work. In 2010 she was awarded a Sesquicentennial medal by the Russian Ministry of Culture for contributions to Chekhov scholarship. Author of books and articles on classic Russian literature, including the recent monograph Dostoevsky's Secrets: Reading Against the Grain, she has also translated several books from Russian and Japanese. Carol lives and works in Durham, North Carolina. Angela Brintlinger is author of two books on twentieth-century Russian literature and culture and editor of Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, among other volumes. Like Carol, she is a published translator. Angela has travelled to Chekhovian places from Yalta to Siberia to speak about the author and reads about him at home in Ohio when she isn’t teaching, writing, or hiking.

Colleagues and former studens of Nina Perlina, Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, have assembled a volume of essays reflecting her research and teaching foci: the Petersburg theme in Russian literature., from Pushikin, Gogol, and especially Dostoevsky, through Nabokov, and into the Siege of World War II; and studies in the thought of Mikail Bakhitn and his contemporaries and more generally, philosophical aesthetics. From Petersburg to Bloominton offers pieces by well-known scholars in hte U.S., Russia, and Europe, on Dostoevksy, Zamiatin, and others, and will appeal to specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture.

Just as the key to Fedor Tjutchev’s life is his poetry, the key to his euphonious lyrics is sound. Tjutchev’s poetry demonstrates how he greatly extended the field of poetic sound form, much beyond the accomplishments of his predecessors. This study develops an original, functional approach to the structural role of assonance as expressed in his works. The functional approach is supplemented with the analytic methods of poetics and lingua-poetics, as well as those of musicology and the theory of music, and employs some common modes of musical analysis in order to treat sound in lyrics as part of a formal system. “For the general lover of poetry, Elizabeth Ginzburg’s book provides fascinating information and insights into the special role of sound in poetic language and into how sound produces and participates in meaning. This study of Tjutchev’s lyrics is a ‘must’ for versification specialists—and not just those in Russian poetry. It offers new approaches in theory and methodology applicable to any Western poetic tradition. The author’s dual expertise in musicology and Russian prosody combine here to produce a unique book.” — Anna Lisa Crone, University of Chicago “Tjutchev: Euphony and Beyond comprises an original approach to the study of verse structure. The author proposes to consider two major verse models, the dynamic (found in Tjutchev, Derzhavin, and Pushkin) and the static (identified in Fet). The work has a particular focus on the role of stressed vowels, as outlined in part 1, ‘Sound and Structure,’ and turns to anagrams in part 2, ‘Sound and Meaning.’ While there have been previous tentative explorations of such subjects as assonance, or anagrams, Elizabeth Ginzburg goes further than other scholars in showing the effect that both features can have on the organization and meaning of a poem. As a person with musical training, she also brings a fresh emphasis to investigating the relationship between music and poetry. In all these regards the book will prove of value to those interested in the study of verse.” — Barry P. Scherr, Mandel Family Professor of Russian, Dartmouth College

This collection of essays is offered with sincere gratitude and appreciation to Natalie Kononenko, Professor and Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography, University of Alberta, Canada and one of the leading Slavic folklorists in North America. The essays in the volume have been contributed by Kononenko’s students, as well as colleagues and friends from various countries. The name of the volume, The Paths of Folklore, reflects the honoree’s position as an active fieldworker who continues to tread many paths while collecting folklore materials in both Eastern Europe and North America. It also reflects the intensely interdisciplinary nature of folklore. Essays in this collection treat a range of folklore-related topics as vast as Natalie’s own interests and will appeal to specialists in Slavic folklore and culture.

Yordan Yovkov (1880-1937) is universally regarded as one of the two best Bulgarian prose writers of the twentieth century. Although he spent most of his adult life in cities, his stories are about the villages and the mountains. The two books translated here both appeared in 1927 and immediately established Yovkov as a major writer. Two years later they brought him the Cyril and Methodius Prize for Literature from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The stories are accompanied by a dozen photographs taken by the translator, a former British diplomat.