This is a revisionist study of Derzhavin's poetic art and his contribution to the emerging importance of the role of "leading poet" in Russian culture and throughout the Russian Empire. As such, it returns to the 18th century and endeavors to remove the long shadow Pushkin and Pushkin scholarship have cast over Derzhavin the artist and cultural phenomenon. Through internal...
Some years ago, while pursuing folklore field work in eastern Canada, the author stumbled upon an active vampire cult. The interest aroused by this discovery led to a series of invited lectures and eventually the establishment of a college course called "Vampires of the Slavs." The questions asked by each new group of students resulted in the present monograph, a...
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....
Professor Townsend's book will be of interest not only to Bohemists, but also to students of Slavic linguistics and to sociolinguists, since spoken and written Czech are radically different and present an unusually interesting case of diglossia. The description of spoken Czech offered here stems first and foremost from detailed study of the speech of a large number of Prague...
This monograph describes the South Slavic dialect of a village which is located about 6 km. south of the Greek-Yugoslav border and 10 km. from the town of Lerin (Florina). The author of this study, who is a professor of Slavic linguistics at the University of Hamburg, had the unique opportunity of living with speakers of the dialect for extended...
Božidar Vidoeski (1920–1998) was the father of Modern Macedonian dialectology. Not only did he publish numerous studies of individual dialects but also broader syntheses that superseded all previous attempts and that remain to this day the foundations of Slavic dialectology on Macedonian linguistic territory. The present collection contains translations of eight of Vidoeski's most important general Macedonian dialectological works, as...
While the examples are taken from scientific texts, this dictionary will be of use to all students of Russian, and especially to all translators. "Omissions" are words or phrases that are not to be translated when turning a Russian text into English. Some examples are: dostatochno in "Ne predlozhen dostatochno ubeditel'noe ob''iasnenie" `A convincing explanation has not been offered'; nado...
A simple tailor, the protagonist of the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem’s last theatrical drama, suddenly becomes rich, but loses his money on account of an obscure cinema deal. The author’s son-in-law and assistant, Y.D. Berkowitz, insisted that the issue of moviemaking be removed from the plot. It seems he tried, among other things, to conceal his father-in-law’s “cinema obsession,”...
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 collection of essays is offered with sincere gratitude and admiration to Donald Ostrowski, Instructor in Extension Studies at Harvard University and one of the most important scholars of Ukraine, Russia, and Eurasia in the last half century. This volume takes its name from the famous Latin phrase from Peter Abelard's Sic et Non: Dubitando enim ad inquisitionem venimus; inquirendo...
“We envied the Russians their samizdat...and then we went a few steps further.”
– Adam Michnik
Duplicator Underground is the first comprehensive in-depth English-language discussion of Polish independent publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. This anthology provides wide-ranging analyses of uncensored publishing and printing in communist Poland between 1976 and 1989. It gives a broad overview, historical explanation, and assessment...