“The present volume is a conscious effort to look at and grasp the meaning of the tumultuous one hundred years of Russian and Soviet  history (1872–1981) by taking an ordinary family perspective as a vantage point and reconstructing it based on the materials of a well-preserved family archive. The result is a deeply entertaining and engaging collage of personal recollections, authentic voices, intimate details, through which events of great magnitude—including multiple revolutions and wars—get illuminated in a distinctly personalized way. For sure, the ultimate result is partisan and partial, imbued with the partiality of love to one’s own kin, the Gudziuk-Gruzdev family. It is difficult to resist the feeling of compassion while reading entries of the personal diaries, the intimate correspondence of family members or listening to the collector’s own voice recounting the family’s itinerary through the century of troubles. Ultimately, by foregrounding love as a key motive, the book provides a story about the perseverance of human love and about the persistence of family ties as opposed to the heaviness of History.” — From the Introduction by Vladimir Ryzhkovski

Aleksei Evstaf´ev’s 1852 book, The Great Republic Tested by the Touch of Truth, is an early work in English by a native of Ukraine who identified as a Russian. Drawing from his years of Russian diplomatic service in the United States, Evstaf´ev presented a critique of American democracy as well as Russian despotism, preferring British constitutional monarchy instead. Writing from a conservative point of view, Evstaf´ev questioned whether people can govern themselves and argued that the fault lines of American politics would lead to a collapse.

The work presents an early example of a Russian critique of America. Particularly strong sections deal with the history of New York City before the Civil War and the problems of the American judicial system.

This annotated version provides the necessary context to understand the discussion of American and European politics and culture during the 1840s and 1850s. The Great Republic Tested by the Touch of Truth is a contribution to the history of Russian-American relations, Russian political thought, and New York City and American history.

Born in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1783, Evstaf´ev studied at the Kharkiv Ecclesiastical Seminary and then joined the Russian embassy in Britain as a churchman for services. His fluency in English and ability to write polemical booklets defending Russia advanced his career, and in 1808 he was named the Russian consul to Boston. There he spent his best-known years as a friend of the Federalist Party and an author of plays and books. With the  collapse of the Federalist

Party, he declined into obscurity. He later served as a diplomat in New York City and died in 1857. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Eli Gumener’s 1921 Yiddish memoir, A Ukrainian Chapter, is a rare historical source about relief work spanning the two most devastating years of the pogroms in the Russian Civil War. He concentrates on the collapse of Jewish communities in Podolia, a region in southwest Ukraine. Gumener worked for the major Russian and American organizations that were active in providing aid to Jewish victims during both World War I and the Russian Civil War. Thus, he presents a unique perspective on leaders, parties, and institutions struggling to respond to the suffering and dislocation that came with wild episodes of violence. This annotated translation serves as a roadmap for the reader by clarifying the social and political contexts in which the events took place. A Ukrainian Chapter is a contribution to the history of pogroms, relief work, and Jewish party politics, through the day-to-day experience of a witness “in the trenches.” Born in Marijampole (near Vilnius) in 1886 and trained for the law in St. Petersburg, Eli (Illia) Gumener (1886–1941?) was a representative and investigator for the Committee to Aid Jewish Pogrom Victims (EKOPO) and the Russian Red Cross. After the Civil War, he worked on behalf of Jewish war orphans for the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJC) in the Białystok region. A Ukrainian Chapter was published in Vilnius in 1921. In 1925 Gumener moved to Novogrudok, Poland (now in Belarus) where he continued to be engaged in communal affairs, including as a city councilman from 1929 to 1934. He and his wife and daughter were murdered during the Holocaust in late 1941 or early 1942.

A book of fourteen sonnets, Pain deals with a historical event from August 1941, when the entire Serbian population of the ethnically mixed village of Miostrah in Bosnia were massacred by their Muslim neighbors in a large genocidal campaign aimed at the complete extermination of the Serbs from the Nazi Independent State of Croatia that at the time included the territory of present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. Among more than 180 slaughtered women and children were all the members of Miroslav Maksimović’s mother’s immediate family. Thirteen years of age and the oldest child, Maksimović’s mother miraculously survived and soon joined the anti-fascist partisan forces.

Using her tragedy as a paradigm for a national trauma, Maksimović created a work that contributes significantly to the Serbian culture of remembrance. But Pain oversteps the relatively narrow boundaries of memorial literature as soon as it outlines them. Maksimović’s decision to juxtapose the poems with the factual, historical account of the massacre provided in the Appendix features the complicated relationship between poetry and history and emphasizes the poet’s belief that historical facts must transcend their facticity in order to become poetry and “hover above the reality of life.” That is why Pain stands as a work that, despite the horrors it depicts, celebrates the triumph of creative effort over senseless destruction—the triumph of poetry over historical evil.

Historians devote a great deal of attention to the diplomacy that led Russia into the Great War, but have tended to neglect the course of this diplomacy once the fighting erupted. This volume addresses that lacuna with a broad range of essays examining the foreign relations of the empire, as well as its republican and early Soviet successors, from the July 1914 Crisis to the end of the Civil War in 1922. Written by distinguished and emerging scholars from North America, Europe, Russia, and Japan, the essays make abundant use of Russian archival collections, largely inaccessible until the 1990s, to reassess the conjectures and conclusions previously drawn from other sources. While some chapters focus on traditional “diplomatic” history, others adopt new “international history” by placing Russia’s relations with the world in their social, intellectual, economic, and cultural contexts. Arranged in roughly chronological order, the first volume covers the late imperial period, from 1914 through mid-1916, while the second proceeds through the revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War, up to the end of that conflict in 1922. Together, these books’ comments should foster a renewed appreciation for international relations as a central element of Russia’s Great War and Revolution.

Michael Hughes, From the February Revolution to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
https://doi.org/10.52500/PPBE3643

Norman E. Saul, The United States and Russia in the Turmoil of War and Revolution, 1914–18
https://doi.org/10.52500/CNJF3673

Liudmila Sultanovna Gatagova, The Global War in Russian Patriotic Literature, 1914–15
https://doi.org/10.52500/VVGU6668

Thomas Bürgisser, Flight to Neutral Territory: Escaped Russian POWs and Deserters in Switzerland
https://doi.org/10.52500/LLXC9908

Marina Soroka, Family Networks in a Divided Europe: The Case of the Benckendorff Family
https://doi.org/10.52500/TLFP2364

John W. Steinberg, The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: The Wilsonian Moment before Wilson
https://doi.org/10.52500/MSQG7856

Oleg Budnitskii, The Diplomacy of the “Second Russia,” 1918–22
https://doi.org/10.52500/NDNS9115

Alastair Kocho-Williams, The Persistence of Tsarist Diplomacy after the Russian Revolution
https://doi.org/10.52500/ILYD1707

Anatol Shmelev, Foreign Minister Redux: Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov and White Diplomacy in Paris, 1918–20
https://doi.org/10.52500/NADM7699

Dinah Jansen, Wilsonian Principles and the Defense of Russian Territory at Versailles, 1919
https://doi.org/10.52500/GADD3063

Charlotte Alston, International Intervention in Russia’s Civil War: Policies, Experiences, and Justifications
https://doi.org/10.52500/RWMB2616

Shūsuke Takahara, Woodrow Wilson’s Intervention in North Russia and Siberia
https://doi.org/10.52500/QUXR5641

Oleksa Drachewych, The Bolsheviks’ Revolutionary International: The Idea and Establishment of the Communist International, 1914–22
https://doi.org/10.52500/ANIJ7435

Daniel C. Waugh, Britain Confronts the Bolsheviks in Central Asia: Great Game Myths and Local Realities
https://doi.org/10.52500/ZCXA5036

Taline Ter-Minassian, From the Transcaspian to the Caucasus: Reginald Teague Jones’s Secret War (1918–21)
https://doi.org/10.52500/LVKE6925

Yulia Yurievna Khmelevskaya, “A la Guerre Comme à la Guerre”: America’s Battle with Hunger in Soviet Russia (1921–23)
https://doi.org/10.52500/HKCM5036

Anthony J. Heywood, Russian and Soviet Foreign Trade, 1914–28: Rethinking the Initial Impact of the Bolshevik Revolution
https://doi.org/10.52500/HXIF7628

Ivan the Terrible continues to fascinate and confuse historians. In Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish Charles J. Halperin presented a new and comprehensive interpretation of Ivan’s personality and reign. In his second book on Ivan, Ivan IV and Muscovy, Halperin both explores in depth conclusions adumbrated only briefly in his first and more often provides additional research on subjects he has not previously discussed. Original studies address a wide panoply of topics and themes. In source study he examines chronicles, German foreigner accounts, and the writings of Ivan Peresvetov. In historiography Halperin analyzes the Russian- and English-language versions of Ruslan Skrynnikov’s classic Reign of Terror. Social history topics include dysfunctional families, contests for office under the precedence system, foreign slaves, and apolitical violence. Evidence of rational rather than ideological thinking by Muscovite diplomats and Elizabeth I’s flattery of Ivan as a ladies’ man belong to diplomatic history. On economic history Halperin raises the question of the weight, literally, of Muscovite coinage. Under the rubric of intellectual history, he continues his examination of “land” concepts, especially the Rus´ Land. Finally, Halperin advances novel observations on Ivan’s famous, or rather infamous, personality, charisma, and temper tantrums. These studies are based upon a range of source material from narrative and diplomatic texts to administrative documents and private legal charters. Conclusions rest upon interpretation of passages or quantitative studies of data bases containing from dozens to hundreds of records. The chapters in this anthology substantiate and greatly supplement theconclusions advanced in Halperin’s monograph and shed further light upon Ivan’s contradictory personality and paradoxical reign.

Empress Catherine II, building on the military and diplomatic successes of Emperor Peter I and Empress Elizabeth, in less than two decades of rule brought Russia to the forefront among European powers. Her creation of a League of Armed Neutrality, uniting several mercantile states of Northern Europe, was intended to guarantee the security of maritime shipping on the high seas from arrest and seizure. The fledgling thirteen United States desperately needed more than their single ally, France (from 1778), to pursue their war for independence. Unwilling to engage in traditional European diplomatic behavior, they developed a concept of “militia diplomacy,” under which merchants would be sent to foreign ports to initiate friendly trading relations. Not fully realizing Catherine’s intention to maintain absolute neutrality in order to mediate peace between Great Britain and its breakaway colonies, the Americans sent to St. Petersburg, uninvited and unannounced, a would-be ambassador. The empress refused to collude in any way. David M. Griffiths (1938–2014) started out to study Revolutionary Era American History. But while still in graduate school he shifted focus to the Russian Empire of the same period, over his career publishing numerous articles on the Russia of Catherine the Great and translating two books from Russian to English. His articles, appearing in journals and as book chapters, have deepened our understanding of the Russian economy, politics, and society during that era, winning him an international reputation. A collection of them appeared as a single volume in Russian translation in Moscow in 2013. All the while, for some decades, he continued quietly to labor on the book that became this volume. It has been edited down from a much larger manuscript, but the argument and the language remain his own.

The 2018 volumes of American contributions to the quintennial series of international congresses bringing together the world’s Slavists provides a representative sampling of current trends in Slavic literature, linguistics, and philology as practiced in the United States.

For the second volume on literature, please see the link here

As the founding director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center and the Heritage Language Journal, Olga Kagan has been a core figure in the development of the field of heritage language studies. By promoting both the creation of a foundational research base and specialized pedagogical training, she has played a seminal role in establishing effective methodologies that address the specific needs of heritage language learners.

The present volume seeks to pay homage to her work by bringing together heritage language specialists who work in various domains and with various languages. Following the model of her work, the editors aim to create bridges between pedagogical and linguistic research, and between researchers and practitioners.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian Empire's 5.2 million Jews were in crisis. Having quintupled in number since 1800, they were substantially impoverished and crammed into Russia's 25 westernmost provinces. Some pinned their hopes on emigration, others on being granted permission to live in the Russian interior. Some labored with hand tools in dingy workshops, but most were forced to eke out a living as petty merchants and paupers. Hardly any were able to find work in Russia's large, mechanized factories.

In this context, the young Yakov Leshchinsky, influenced in equal measure by Marx and the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-am, embarked on a lifelong task of analyzing the fate of the Jewish people. In The Jewish Worker in Russia (1906), a combination political pamphlet, theoretical excursus, and empirical analysis, he established a foundation for the ideology of the Zionist Socialist Workers' Party, presaged modern sociological concepts explaining the limited proletarianization and industrialization of the Jewish working class, and gave substance to the theory by analyzing a large body of unique statistical data, mainly from official sources and a quasi-census of Russian Jews funded by the Jewish Colonization Association. It was a landmark work that underscored the limitations of pure Marxism, Zionism, and liberalism; led eventually to the view that Jews would be best off seeking democracy, socialism, and personal and cultural autonomy in many geographical centers; and foretold the course of Leshchinsky's own life and career as a founding father of Jewish social science, director of YIVO's Economics and Statistics Department, and resident of Ukraine, Switzerland, Russia, Poland, Germany, and the United States who spent his last years in Israel.

Yevsey Tseytlin’s Long Conversations in Anticipation of a Joyous Death  came about as the result of an unusual experiment. The subject of this book is unusual and deceptively simple: two authors, one young, one old and ailing, maintain a conversation over a period of five years. The setting is the city Vilnius—known before World War II as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” As the meetings take place, the young author records on cassette the confessions of a man preparing to die. The dying man is the Jewish-Lithuanian intellectual Jokūbas Josadė , and his revelations are often distressing, for his life consists of a series of betrayals (including that of self and of his talent) and of limitless fear and apprehension.

“A tragic account, taken from the lips of a man who awaits death as a redemption from the torment of his conscience. The philosophical aspect of narrating one’s own death is worthy of its own discussion, which should include Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, as well as the academic Pavlov, Nikolai Ostrovsky, and perhaps, that American intellectual who invited all who wished to observe his throes of agony via the Internet.”
 —Russian critic Lev Anninsky

“…By means of dialogue, reflections, and a collection of chance remarks is constructed so genuine a whole, illuminated by so tragic a light, that this book could be termed a novel, and not just any novel, but an exceptional one.”
 —Professor Anatoly Liberman

A writer, screenwriter, and playright, Jan Novák left Communist Czechoslovakia for Chicago as a teenager in 1969. Novák writes in both Czech and English and has received numerous awards for his works in both America and the Czech Republic.

"There are stories that could have taken place anywhere - of love and hate, beauty and ugliness, illness and music - stories distinctly and intriguingly Slovak..."

Into the Spotlight features the best of what Slovak literature has to offer today. The sixteen authors presented here have all been shortlisted for, and many have won, some of the most prestigious Slovak and European literary awards. They represent the Slovak literary scene across the lines of gender, age, style and subject matter. Most importantly, all of them are living authors, engaging with today’s world and carrying on conversations with other contemporary writers and readers. Printed with financial support from the Centre for Information on Literature/SLOLIA (Slovak Literature Abroad).

Contributors

Veronika Šikulová –Uršuľa Kovalyk – Pavel Vilikovský – Jana Beňová – Viťo Staviarsky – Dušan Mitana – Balla – Pavol Rankov – Zuzana Cigánová – Monika Kompaníková – Michal Hvorecký – Lukáš Luk – Marek Vadas – Alta Vášová – Ivana Dobrakovová – Peter Macsovszky

More about this title in the press

Review in World Literature Today, November/December 2017

Review in B O D Y, International Online Literary Journal, "Slovak Fiction Week," March 31, 2017

Review in European Literature Network, June 15, 2017

Notable mention in Publishing Perspectives, May 24, 2017

Notable mention in The Slovak Spectator

Interview in Words Without Borders, September 23, 2017

Born in the White House in 1876, Julia Grant, granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant, had a life of adventure that included her marriage into the Cantacuzène family in 1900, and a move to Russia.  Her book gives the reader a firsthand account of Russia during World War I and recounts her travels across the empire, where she saw the horrors of war, revolution, and civil war only to escape to Finland to avoid the danger that many Russian nobles faced. Throughout her work, she expressed admiration for the cultures of Russian and non-Russian peoples of the empire.

Louise Bryant and her husband John Reed were among a relatively small group of Americans who participated in one of the most important events of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution of 1917. As first-hand observers, they attended meetings of the revolutionaries, were present at the Winter Palace as it was under attack, and witnessed the surrender of the palace guards. Over the next weeks, they saw a new regime emerge and met many of its most important figures, including Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Kollontai. Bryant returned home in 1918 and immediately began working on the book that would become Six Red Months in Russia. Unfortunately for Bryant, her sex and her relationship with Reed overshadowed her talent as a writer and the depth of her observations of this historic event. But Bryant deserves better; she had her own voice and was a skilled observer and journalist in her own right. While Reed’s book is certainly a significant work, it contains little personal commentary. Bryant’s account, by comparison, is also a documentation of the revolution, but it goes farther than Reed’s in many ways, adding interpretation to observation. Bryant communicates what life was like during the days of the revolution—the people, the food, the excitement, the fear. She is also keenly aware of her American audience and speaks directly to them, urging them to pay attention to this world-changing moment in history and not to be fooled by the misinformation about Bolshevism and the new regime. Six Red Months in Russia conveys Bryant’s understanding of the revolution, and reminds us of the utter enthusiasm that many Russians, and Americans, felt for socialism and its yet-untainted, utopian ideals. This new edition of Bryant’s book is annotated and set in its appropriate historical context to create a more accessible text for modern readers on the anniversary of this truly world-changing event. 

This volume is a tribute to Theofanis G. Stavrou, Professor of Russian and Near Eastern History and Director of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Minnesota. A generous and penetrating scholar, as well as an award-winning teacher and mentor, Professor Stavrou is well known for his infectious enthusiasm for collaborative scholarship and wide-ranging expertise in Russian history and culture, Eastern Orthodox Church history, Modern Greek literature, and other fields. The forty-four contributors to this collection are a diverse group of mainly senior American scholars who have published erudite monographs related to the fields of Slavic, European, Mediterranean, and Eastern Orthodox studies.

Professor Stavrou has been a veritable institution in the United States for more than forty years. His works are cited broadly and his research has more often been confirmed than challenged over his career—something others could only wish for themselves. Professor Stavrou has also been the academic advisor of several generations of scholars in North America and Europe, and his ideas have influenced even young scholars who were not ever formally his students. His generosity and breadth of knowledge has been and continues to be tapped by scholars around the world, yet he remains modest about his own accomplishments and place in the field(s) he has pursued. Despite that modesty, this volume convincingly demonstrates that no one has earned the honor of a Festschrift more than he has.

Russell E. Martin
Professor of History
Westminster College

This is the first of three volumes which comprise a set of Anna Lisa Crone's Collected Writings. Volume 1 collects her solo writings on Russian poetry, including an excerpt from her monograph on Gavrila Deržavin.

Anna Lisa Crone had a 30-year career as a scholar and teacher of Russian literature, mentoring dozens of graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Chicago, and leaving an indelible mark on the field of Russian literary studies in the United States. Her analytical method was based on close reading and interpretation supported both by impeccable philological grounding and rich intercultural awareness.

Additional volumes:

Volume 2: Rozanov and Philosophical Literature

Volume 3: Collaborations, Prose Studies, and Other Works

The third volume of Anna Lisa Crone’s Collected Writings includes works which did not fit neatly into the thematics of the first two volumes. It features four outstanding jointly-authored works (among them a chapter from the book My Petersburg, Myself), as well as her previously unpublished 1969 Harvard M.A. thesis on Gončarov.

Anna Lisa Crone had a 30-year career as a scholar and teacher of Russian literature, mentoring dozens of graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Chicago, and leaving an indelible mark on the field of Russian literary studies in the United States. Her analytical method was based on close reading and interpretation supported both by impeccable philological grounding and rich intercultural awareness.

Additional volumes:

Volume 1: Poetry

Volume 2: Rozanov and Philosophical Literature

Common Slavic: Progress and Problems in its Reconstruction is an extraordinarily valuable annotated literature review. It is dated only in the sense that the literature surveyed is now fifty years older. There is nothing dated about the commentary on the literature, and given the relatively moderated pace of progress in historical Slavic linguistics in this era of intense focus on linguistic theory, a substantial portion of the material surveyed in this book is still state of the art with respect to our understanding of the historical comparative problems.

Click Slavica Reissue - Common Slavic to begin download

Also see related reissue of Recent Advances in the Reconstruction of Common Slavic (1971-1982)

Gods of the Ancient Slavs when it was published provided a valuable and comprehensive review of the literature on Slavic mythology, with extensive notes and bibliography, making it a superlative springboard for further research and interpretation in this interdisciplinary crossroads of Slavic history and philology. In granting permission to post this scanned version of the text, the author expressed the fervent wish that it could be retypeset. This illustrates the pre-computer state of many Slavica publications, which in 1980 were often “typeset” on an IBM Selectric III typewriter, with dozens of specialized or custom-designed typing elements. But a free reprint like this one simply cannot support the expense of OCR-ing the work, and then doing the extensive cleanup required for the necessary degree of accuracy. So we apologize to the author, and other authors, and take refuge in the assumption that content is more important to scholars than form.

Slavica would like to express its sincere thanks to Myroslava Znayenko for graciously granting permission for this reprint. We welcome comments on this and other forthcoming titles to be released in this series.

Click 08_SLAVICA_REISSUE_Gods of the Ancient Slavs.pdf to begin download

For more about Ivan's Daughter, read our interview with translator Margaret Winchell. 

As E. L. Doctorow noted, “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.” Understanding present-day Russia requires a grasp of the country’s history. While the facts may be plain, what life was actually like for the citizens of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union is the subject of this collection of fiction by one of the country’s greatest contemporary writers, Valentin Rasputin.
Born and raised in rural Siberia, Rasputin rose from the humblest of origins to the heights of literary acclaim during the 1970s. While his novellas from that period exemplify the village-prose movement in Russian literature, they also display a distinctive voice, narrative technique, and style along with universal appeal that set them apart. Although never a member of the Communist Party, the author received the Soviet Union’s highest literary awards and became extremely popular among its avid readers.
During the tumultuous years of perestroika, Rasputin, deeply concerned about his homeland, stopped writing fiction and became involved in politics. But after serving in the Congress of People’s Deputies and as an adviser to Gorbachev, he soon became disillusioned with Russia’s political process and returned to his literary calling, creating works that depict a new world whose trials and traumas he knew well.
The stories and novella in this collection delve into the burning issues of that time, including questions of morality and sheer survival. By bringing a variety of characters to life—from young children, teenagers, and middle-aged adults to old peasants and new Russians—Rasputin allows readers to experience the immediate post-Soviet past together with ordinary folks. In addition to shedding light on the present, these works offer an armchair trip to Siberia along with the aesthetic pleasures that flow from the pen of a master storyteller.

Book Reviews

Review by Paul Richardson in Russian Life, Jul/Aug2017, Vol. 60 Issue 4

Medieval Slavic Texts, Volume 1 is a collection of medieval texts, reprinted for students of Slavic philology, and representing a wide range of genres, language variants, and orthographic systems. As the title implies, the original intention was to continue the series with later texts, but this never actually happened. Nevertheless, this collection provides a selection of useful texts in accessible form. It should be noted that in the original print work, most pages were presented in portrait orientation, but some were landscape, and in this .pdf version we have rotated these pages to make them suitable for on-­‐‑screen reading. Our sincere thanks to Charles E. Gribble, co-­‐‑founder and long-­‐‑time owner of Slavica, for granting permission for this reprint. The publisher welcomes comments on this and other forthcoming out-­‐‑of-­‐‑print titles to be restored in this series.

Click Slavica Reissue - Medieval Slavic Texts to begin download

Morphosyntax in Slavic was the first of three major collections of articles on Slavic morphosyntax which helped define the research agendas of Slavic linguists during the period when syntactic theory was becoming more highly constrained and therefore more complex than it had been during the first two decades of Chomskyan theory. Even today they are splendid examples of linguistic argumentation and valid generalizations. Richard D. Brecht served as co-editor of all three collections, while both Leonard H. Babby and Alan Timberlake had articles in all three books, so together these scholars constitute a connecting thread running through the three volumes (the second and third of which are Issues in Russian Morphosyntax and Case in Slavic.)

Slavica would like to express its sincere thanks to Catherine Chvany and Richard Brecht for graciously granting permission for this reprint. 

Click 10_Chvany & Brecht_Morphosyntax in Slavic to begin download

The Origins of the Slavs: A Linguist’s View is a deep philological investigation into the identification of the original homeland where the Slavic languages and ethnicities coalesced as distinct from other Indo-European peoples. Zbigniew Gołąb, Professor of Slavic Linguistics at the University of Chicago, surveys a huge range of data and contributes numerous original analytical points of his own.

Slavica would like to express its sincere thanks to the late author’s wife Janina Gołąbowa. We welcome comments on this and other forthcoming titles to be released in this series.

Click Slavica Reissue - Origins of the Slavs to begin download

This collection of essays pays tribute to Radmila  (Rajka) Jovanović Gorup’s different areas of expertise and demonstrates the diapason of her scholarly and personal impact on the Slavic and linguistics scholarly communities. The essays cover a range of topics of contemporary scholarship, ranging from sociolinguistics to Danube studies and Serbian postmodern art. They represent a cross-section of scholarly debates on Serbian literature, culture, theory, sociology, and aesthetics – in fact, a microcosm of Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature, which mirror Rajka’s life-long interest in diversity and transculture. 

Radmila  (Rajka) Jovanović Gorup received her B.A. in English literature from the Department of Philology at the University of Belgrade before she moved to the United States in 1967, where she continued her postgraduate studies, first at St. John’s University, where she graduated with an M.A. in French Literature, and then at Columbia University, where she gained an M.A. and PhD in Linguistics. Rajka had a distinguished career, teaching undergraduates and graduates in Serbo-Croatian (now B/C/S) language, literature, and culture at Columbia from 1980 to her retirement in 2014, with a spell of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley (1986–1993). She has made significant contributions to her fields of specialization – theoretical linguistics, Serbocroatistica, sociolinguistics, and theories of grammar. She was a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship in 1986, a grant from the American Association of Learned Societies in 1991, and several teaching grants for the improvement of Serbo-Croatian teaching materials. She has been an Executive Board Member of the Columbia School Linguistic Society (1998–2009) and Chair of the University Seminar of the Columbia School of Linguistics (2012–). Rajka was an active promoter of Serbian and (ex-) Yugoslav literature and culture in the Anglophone sphere. She has edited a number of important translations and essays on Serbian literature, among them The Prince of Fire:  An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Short Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), The Slave Girl and Other Stories about Women by Ivo Andrič (CEU Press, 2009), for which she received the Misha Đorđević Book Award from the North American Society for Serbian Studies, and After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land (Stanford University Press, 2013). Her initiative – The Njegoš Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture at Columbia University – received strong institutional support and is now a major forum on contemporary Serbian culture and public affairs in the US.

This book provides some of the fruits of a career teaching Slavic linguistics and phonological theory. Bill Darden was trained in both Prague-School linguistics and generative phonology, and integrates both in his work. He was among the early proponents of the relevance of phonemics and the distinction between morphophonology and phonology in generative phonology. He uses his knowledge of Slavic history to marshal theoretical arguments in phonology, and uses phonological theory to help explain phenomena in the history of Russian. In pure historical linguistics, he offers possible solutions for one of the biggest problems in Balto-Slavic historical linguistics—the reconstruction of the Balto-Slavic verb and the sources of that system in Indo-European.

City of Memory brings together 122 poems written by 21 authors in the last quarter century. These writers draw upon the deep-rooted tradition of Polish literature established by poets like Kochanowski, Norwid, and Herbert, whose worldviews and aesthetics they often challenge. Experimenting with new verse forms and literary conventions, individual poets marvel at the beauty of the surrounding scenery, express their fears or evoke fleeting memories of people and places, yet in the end return to the storehouse of native heritage and history. Michael J. Mikos is Professor and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of 15 books, including a six-volume history and anthology of Polish literature, and recipient of the PEN Club Prize for his translations of Polish literature into English.

Book Reviews

The Sarmatian Review, April 2016

How did Russian workers develop the revolutionary outlook and the level of political consciousness and organizational experience that made them the crucial political and social force in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917? Creating a Culture of Revolution offers an alternative reading of the revolutionary workers’ movement, with circle activity and propaganda literature at the center of a developing “culture of revolution.” Pearl focuses on four popular genres of propaganda literature: revolutionary skazki or tales, expositions of political economy, poetry and song, and foreign novels in translation. Her analysis of the grassroots revolutionary subculture of radical workers contributes to a reevaluation of the broader history of the Russian revolutionary movement.

This book is Volume 8 of the  Allan K. Wildman Group Historical Series

An important part of Balkan folk literature, oral ballads of the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina are part of the European tradition of ballads. One of the broad themes that one encounters repeatedly in Bosnian Muslim oral ballads is the stepping outside of boundaries by the protagonist. In order to protect his honor, to be faithful to his religion, or to be faithful to his beloved, the protagonist follows a higher command despite the dictates or expectations of society and in that lies his tragedy. There is a great variety of symbolism to be found in these ballads, a symbolism that is often both delicate and subtle. Emotions are expressed by objects that have rich layers of connotations beyond their immediate use. Symbolism related to embroidery is very common. As a girl embroiders in a high tower by a window or in a garden, events unfold around her, and the embroidery or her embroidery frame symbolizes her emotions. Other symbolic objects are associated with men, such as the tambura, a type of stringed instrument. The hero will pick up his tambura and sing of his emotions, which may not be expressed in speech. This anthology contains a range of ballads, including those with historical and cultural references, as well as references to traditional Bosnian folk beliefs. Included are well-known ballads, such as “Hasanaginica,” also known as “What Gleams White On The Green Mountain,” as well as two ballads on the death of the Morić brothers of Sarajevo. But there are also rarer gems, including the brief, but highly emotional, “I Dreamt A Dream.” Finally, this bilingual anthology contains an extensive introduction with discussion of poetic doublets, loanwords, and symbolism as well as the cultural framework, which helps to shape these ballads and inform their place as one of the major genres of Bosnian folk literature.

Thirty-five years after the publication of Charles Gribble’s monumental Russian Root List, Slavica Publishers offers Cynthia M. Vakareliyska’s Lithuanian Root List, the first list of common Lithuanian roots that contains their English meanings. Modeled on the Russian Root List, the Lithuanian Root List also provides the most common Lithuanian prefixes and suffixes, together with their English meanings. Cynthia M. Vakareliyska is Professor of Linguistics and member of the Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies program at the University of Oregon. Cover Artwork: Original paper cut design by Nijolė Jurienė, traditional Lithuanian folk artist. Photograph reproduced with permission of Laimutė Fedosejeva.

Book Reviews

Review in SEEJ, Vol. 60, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 593-594 pp.

Review in JSL, Vol. 24, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2016), 393-397 pp.

This volume presents eleven articles on Slavic linguistics and accentology in honor of Professor Emeritus Ronald F. Feldstein of Indiana University. Ronald Feldstein has been a leading practitioner in historical and comparative Slavic linguistics, with a special focus on accentology, since the early 1970s, and his career has intersected with many prominent Slavists as students and colleagues. The book also includes two personal reminiscences and a bibliography of Professor Feldstein's publications.

The Forms of Russian gives a thorough account of Russian morphology and morphophonemics pitched at intermediate to advanced learners of Russian, and is especially suited for a course in the structure of Russian for Russian majors and beginning graduate students. It has two principal goals: 1) to give an explicit description of many aspects of Russian declension and conjugation (including stress placement) without introducing a great deal of theoretical superstructure and formalism; and 2) to demonstrate how we can establish a systematic description of Russian, and identify the data and issues which are most important in this kind of description. A serendipitous side effect is to demonstrate the principles of structural linguistics through the laboratory of Russian morphology. The book is written in a lively, personal style and is richly accompanied by examples and exercises designed to encourage thinking and understanding rather than rote memorization. Charles Gribble taught Slavic languages and linguistics for forty-nine years at three universities: Ohio State, Indiana, and Brandeis. He was the 1992 recipient of the award for Outstanding Contribution to the Profession from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and in 2006 the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences honored him with the Marin Drinov Award. In addition to his other achievements, Charles Gribble was co-founder of Slavica Publishers and served as its president from 1966–97.

Horace Gray Lunt (1918–2010), one of the leading Slavic philologists of his time, spent his entire academic career at Harvard University (1949–89), where he helped to train generations of graduate students in Slavic philology and linguistics, many of whom went on to occupy college and university posts throughout the United States. The present volume, Philology Broad and Deep, contains twenty-one essays dedicated to his memory by his former students and close colleagues. These contributions reflect his own devotion to philology, linguistics, and medieval studies, and confirm his enduring influence on those he taught and mentored.

This volume presents an analysis of clause structure in Bulgarian, with special focus on several interrelated areas: complementizers and complementation, wh-movement constructions including a variety of relative and interrogative clauses, and the structure of the left periphery of the clause including topic, focus, and dislocation positions. The basic proposal consists of a partially nonconfigurational, V-initial S constituent, with functional projections above it; a broad array of facts about Bulgarian sentence structure are accounted for by movement of all wh-phrases to Comp and subjects and other material to a topic position above Comp and a focus position below it. Originally published in 1986, this book was one of the first works to approach Bulgarian syntax within a generative framework. As such it brought up a number of issues which have become perennial problems in Balkan and Slavic linguistics, in particular issues of multiple wh movement and the relation between wh _and Focus. By taking seriously the rule-governed nature of non-standard and informal spoken language, the book uncovered data not dealt with in traditional grammars, including theoretically important facts about resumptive pronouns and island constraints in colloquial deto relatives, clitic doubling, and correlations of intonation with syntactic structure. In addition to analyzing previously unstudied data, it cast new light on classic problems in Bulgarian grammar including the proper analysis of the infinitive-like da-construction. This influential and seminal work is now available in a corrected edition, with a new forward by the author.

Horace G. Lunt’s Concise Dictionary of Old Russian is a “bridge” dictionary spanning the lexical territory between Old Church Slavic and Modern Russian. For all its 40-plus years, it remains the best available short dictionary (some 5,500 entries) for providing access to some seven centuries of Russian literary production, including especially the standard texts that are read in courses covering the medieval period of the 11th-14th centuries. The Concise Dictionary of Old Russian is particularly strong in providing explications for words connected to Old and Middle Russian material and spiritual culture, especially ecclesiastical words, rhetorical terms, and items of foreign origin. Additionally, it is valuable for providing meanings for words that still exist in modern Russian but that have undergone significant semantic change or specialization. The lexical selection reflects years of Professor Lunt’s practical experience determining which words cause graduate students difficulty when reading texts in Old and Middle Russian. Oscar E. Swan’s updated version of the Lunt dictionary does more than take the 1970 work, originally reproduced as typed on an old-fashioned manual Russian typewriter, and reissue it in modern typography. His line-by-line editing corrects many inconsistencies and errors in the original, modernizes the Russian glosses (many of which were copied from 19th c. sources and had become obsolete), and improves on the system of cross-references and verb citation. Generous inflectional tables of Old Russian nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs are given in a supplement. In the age of the internet, Swan’s version of the Lunt dictionary is available not only here, in hard-copy, but also in an electronic version (at http://lektorek.org), lexically interactive with glossaries of Old Church Slavic and Modern Russian, as well as a constantly expanding library of normalized medieval Russian texts.

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. Even today poetry is held in the highest esteem as a particularly noble form of art, not just a domain of academic studies, but a part of daily life…. Poetry is indeed the key to understanding Georgian culture. The present anthology offers the English-speaking reader a first-rate collection of Georgian poems in translation, a valuable glimpse into the treasures of Georgian poetry.… (Lyn Coffin) has shaped the material into poems in English, while maintaining the distinctive voice and flavors of the originals, and staying as true to their forms as possible. Although the selection of poems is limited to the works of a handful of the most outstanding names, every single one of these poems is a masterpiece… — Dodona Kiziria, from the introduction to Georgian Poetry: Rustaveli to Galaktion. A Bilingual Anthology I praise and thank Lyn Coffin for bringing us these Georgian poets in such finely polished translations. — Sam Hamill, Poets Against War Lyn Coffin is a widely-published American poet, fiction writer, playwright, and translator. In 2007 she was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from the World Academy of Arts and Culture (UNICEF) “for poetic excellence and her efforts on behalf of world peace.” Lyn teaches literary fiction at the University of Washington (Department of Professional and Continuing Education), and leads translation seminars at the Shota Rustaveli Institute (Tbilisi) in the summer. Thirteen volumes of her poetry and translations have been published, and her plays have been presented in Singapore, Off-Off-Broadway theaters, and elsewhere. Many of her short stories have been published: one appeared in the collection Best American Short Stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates. A bilingual collection of her fiction is set to appear in 2013. She is currently working on a translation of Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther Skin. In 2014, Lyn will present her translations of Mohsen Emadi at the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in Seattle. See her website at http://lyncoffin.com

The second revised edition of this innovative book teaches the user to read Bulgarian by taking advantage of the similarities between Bulgarian and Russian. Fifty-one sections explaining the structure of the Bulgarian language are reinforced by thirty-six reading selections, fourteen of them new. The book can be used with a teacher or for self instruction. Persons without a knowledge of Russian will need to look up more words in a Bulgarian-English dictionary. Starting with the first reading selection broad use is made of proverbs, which provide content intended for native speakers and interesting for the message conveyed, but with limited vocabulary and only those grammatical structures which have been explained to date. New reading material includes, among other things, uncut short stories by Elin Pelin and Yordan Yovkov, the first thirty-six articles of the new Bulgarian Constitution, a short epic song starring Krali Marko and Sharko the Wonder Horse, a selection of Gabrovo jokes, encyclopedia articles (on Cyril and Methodius, the Bulgarian language, three leading scholars, St. John’s Day), poetry by Hristo Botev, and more. Charles Gribble taught Slavic languages and linguistics for forty-nine years at three universities: Ohio State, Indiana, and Brandeis. In 2006 the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences honored him with the Marin Drinov Award for his scholarly contributions in the field of Slavistics and Bulgarian studies and for his development of scholarly collaboration between the USA and the Republic of Bulgaria. In addition to his other achievements, Charles Gribble was co-founder of Slavica Publishers and served as its president from 1966–97.

This volume focuses on the Revolution of 1905 as a critical juncture in modern Russian history and offers a fresh approach by treating the revolution as a transnational and transcultural phenomenon. In five sections, “Shifting Identities,” “Revolution and Civil Society,” “Center and Peripheries,” “The Revolution in Media and Culture,” and “The International Dimension and Flows of Concepts and Ideas,” the essays combine a wide range of analyses to explore transcultural entanglements and expand our understanding of the first Russian Revolution.

This book is Volume 6 of the  Allan K. Wildman Group Historical Series

Here is the story of Vasily’s Island, the largest of the islands that make up St. Petersburg. While small in size, it has played a substantial role in several aspects of the city’s life since its founding in 1703, becoming above all its intellectual and educational center. Although little more than a glorified sandbar in the early eighteenth century, Vasily’s Island is where Peter the Great decided to locate his newly created Imperial Academy of Sciences. It also became home to the university, the naval academy, and a multitude of colleges, institutes, libraries, and museums. The Academy of Arts fostered a bohemian atmosphere that attracted Russia’s leading writers and composers as well as artists, forming a stark contrast to the island’s staid German community. As the arts blossomed on the east side, industry bloomed along the periphery, producing giants in shipbuilding, armaments, electronics, tobacco processing, and piano making. Spiritual life flowered as well. Along with numerous churches, the cluster of shrines and graveyards in the middle of the island have made it the spiritual heart of Peter’s town; St. Ksenia’s chapel, one of the holiest spots in Russian Orthodoxy, still draws pilgrims from afar. But despite its prominence, Vasily’s Island is also a place where ordinary people live. The quiet neighborhoods of its residential west side reflect the struggles and accomplishments typical of urban Russia as a whole. The pearl that lies in the shell of St. Petersburg resembles a self-sufficient miniature country, especially when the drawbridges go up at night to let the big ships through, and may be viewed as a microcosm of the nation to which it belongs.

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.

A Grammar of Macedonian is the first comprehensive reference grammar to this language couched in the framework of generative grammar. The author has ensured cross-framework accessibility of the data by the constrained use of technical terminology and frequent reference to non-generative grammars of Macedonian, in particular to the works of Blaže Koneski and Zuzanna Topolinjska. The volume focuses on the structure of the nominal phrase and the clause as the principal intersection points of morphology and syntax. Preliminary chapters are devoted to sociolinguistic issues, historical development of Macedonian, the Balkan Sprachbund, and the phonology of the contemporary language. The core of the volume, however, is represented by extensive analysis of the nominal phrase (spanning four chapters) and clausal structure (six chapters). It is in these areas that the rich complexity of Macedonian morphosyntax emerges in full detail. A wealth of examples in the book and tables provides ample data for students studying Macedonian, as well as linguists who would like to get a taste of its unique features. Copious examples are given in full clausal form, illustrating a range of clausal types, including the range of tenses, mood structures, and interrogative and relative clauses. This book is recommended for library collections at community colleges, four-year colleges, and research universities.

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.

Alexander Rabinowitch is a towering figure among historians of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Distinguished by an unrivaled mastery of published and archival materials, a compelling narrative style and demythologizing interpretations, his books are the essential account of events that truly changed the world. During his remarkable career, Rabinowitch has also trained and mentored many graduate students who themselves became important scholars. A select group of them has produced Russia’s Century of Revolutions in his honor. The title reflects the range of Rabinowitch’s influence, and the contents, pathbreaking essays in their own right, are written in his independent spirit. The result is a volume for everyone seriously interested in modern Russian history and thus for every library.” Stephen F. Cohen Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at Princeton University and New York University and author, most recently, of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives. “Alexander Rabinowitch made his reputation as a scholar from his meticulous empirical research into the actions of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd in 1917, producing carefully nuanced studies that rewrote the historiography of their coming to power. This volume secures his reputation as a mentor, an inspiration behind generations of budding historians who learned from his methodology and profited from his generosity, as he directed Russian and Soviet history in innovative directions. A fitting tribute to a remarkable career.” Louise McReynolds University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Class of Rabinowitch, 1977)

UCLA Slavic Studies no. 7 Russia’s first narrative history, The Book of Degrees of the Royal Genealogy (Kniga stepennaia tsarskogo rodosloviia), was produced in the Kremlin scriptorium of the Moscow metropolitans during the reign of Ivan IV (1533–84). A collaborative project to prepare a new critical edition in three volumes, based on the text of the earliest surviving copies with variants and commentary, spurred intensive research into the book’s manuscripts and its sources. In February of 2009, an international group of scholars with expertise in a range of disciplines convened at UCLA to consider the book’s representation of Kievan and Muscovite history, the politics of its creation, its literary status, and its ideological uses in its time as well as larger themes: What are the pre-conditions for a “culture of history”? How do historical narratives legitimize and influence their present? Selected articles presented at this forum, which build on and reference these discussions, have been arranged in thematic groups. Section 1 focuses on the Stepennaia kniga’s genesis, production, and institutional status. Section 2 looks at the book’s narrative and stylistic models. Section 3 traces and contextualizes the book’s construction of historical narratives in successive steps. Section 4 considers religious patronage and observance in the broader Muscovite context. The final section explores church efforts to exert moral influence on Russian rulers. Some of the articles in this volume present sharply differing views and interpretations, while in other cases we find more nuanced readings of the evidence than earlier scholarship had considered. Overall, these essays raise more questions than they answer, and we hope that this reconsideration of the Stepennaia kniga will stimulate continuing discussion and analysis of the role and importance of narrative history in Muscovite Rus’ and in subsequent Russian culture.

Book Reviews

Review by John Ellison in Slavic and East European Journal, 59.2 (Summer 2015)

This richly illustrated volume’s innovative intersciplinary approaches and engagement with the newest scholarly literature presents a new basis for exploration of holy foolishness in Russia as a unique expression of national identity. Its articles elucidate the genesis, nature, and development of the foolishness in the medival period and its on-going significance as a broadly cultural and religious paradigm. Sweeping in its scope, this volume is poineering in several respects: addressing holy foolishness from its Byzantine origins to postmodern, contemporary Russia, it offers innovative explorations of hagiographical, historical, poetic, and liturgical apsects of writings about such seeminal holy fools as Andrew of Constantinople, Isaakii of Kiev Caves Monastery and Kseniia of St. Petersburg; the first English translation of A. M.Panchenko’s classic study of holy foolish phenomenology, “Laughter as Spectacle”; and new discussions of miniatures accompanying the text of St. Andrew’s vita. Further, it addresses foundational moments in the institutionalization of holy foolishness: the Church calendar commemorations of holy fools inherited from Byzantium; the first Russian holy foolish narrative; the genesis of the Intercession cult in the vita of Andrew the fool; the first holy foolish vita with verifiable facts about the protagonist’s life; the first canonized Russian female holy fool, Kseniia of St. Petersburg; and comprehensive treatments of holy foolery’s culturological significance for Leningrad underground poets, Soviet and post-Soviet performance art, and postmodern thinkers. The volume’s innovative interdisciplinary approaches and engagement with the newest scholarly literature assure its broad appeal to students and teachers of Russian culture, and of comparative, and religious studies, and offer a new basis for exploration of this spiritually and culturally complex phenomenon. This book is recommended for library collections at community colleges, four-year colleges, and research universities.

UCLA Slavic Studies no. 8 This interdisciplinary and bilingual collection of critical essays and materials brings together Kuzmin scholars from three countries (the United States, Russia, and Israel) to provide a multi-­‐‑ faceted portrait of Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936), a key but underestimated figure of Russian modernism whose artistic output reflects the rich variety of a latter-­‐‑day Renaissance man. The articles have been grouped under rubrics that identify Kuzmin’s various achievements in poetry, drama, prose, and music; with two additional sections dedicated to his intergeneric poetics and his reflections on literature and the fine arts of his era. Other activities—writing sensational diaries (whose fragments he used to read at private gatherings and published), participating in theatrical performances (as composer, librettist, and even actor), reviewing literary and theatrical events, and last but not least, producing translations, some of which became textbook examples of the art—are discussed in the essays. The present volume also aims at a new interpretation of Kuzmin’s oeuvre. At this point, with the majority of Kuzmin’s works published, his autobiographical writings (including diaries and correspondence) available, and an updated biography (by Nikolay Bogomolov and John E. Malmstad) in print, the time is ripe for moving from a biography-­‐‑centered approach to a concep-­‐‑ tual one.

The principal idea behind this book is that lexis and grammar make up a single coherent structure. It is shown that the grammatical patterns of the different classes of Russian nominals are closely interconnected. They can be described as reflecting a limited set of semantic distinctions which are also rooted in the lexical-semantic classification of Russian nouns. The presentation focuses on semantics, both lexical and grammatical, and not least the connection between these two levels of content. The principal theoretical impact is the insight that grammar and lexis should not be seen as a random collection of subsystems, but as a comprehensive structure of interconnected oppositions, repeating the same semantic distinctions at different levels and in different lexical and grammatical classes. The book is of interest to students of Russian and linguists with some command, stronger or weaker, of Russian. Students will see a pattern in what is traditionally described as disparate subsystems, and linguists may be inspired to consider the theoretical points concerning language as a coherent system, determining usage. This book is recommended for library collections at community colleges, four-year colleges, and research universities.

Book Reviews

Review in "SEEJ," Vol. 60, no. 3 (Summer 2016), 591-592 pp.

This innovative suite of instructional material for advanced students of Russian is aimed at fostering their transition from slow, controlled speech to native-like fluency. The driving methodology is lexicalist-oriented, implying an emphasis on the situated internalization of vocabulary, so that grammar skills develop naturally with the repeated use of particular words and phrases in combination. The textbook centers around authentic stories by contemporary Russian writers, supplemented by cultural background, various activities, and the treatment of select grammatical points. These stories will not only challenge students to read real Russian, they will also provide a stimulus for free discussion about social circumstances, human relationships, and moral values reflected in the literature.

The text is accompanied by cloud access to multimedia materials designed by Lexicon Bridge Publishers. These are the first instructional materials for advanced Russian that are oriented around unmodified literary texts; focus on the development of fluent speech; use cutting-edge technology to support guided reading; offer microtexts as the basis for numerous activists; provide detailed and varied potential responses to open-ended questions; and underscore the one point that almost goes without saying: that one cannot master a language without knowing the words.

The Escaped Mystery explores the poetry of Momčilo Nastasijević, whose poetic achievement is described by E.D. Goy as “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, in the Serbian language of the twentieth century.” Although his output was small, Nastasijević was the supreme modernist Yugoslav poet of his time and is deeply respected by leading modern Serbian poets, such as Vasko Popa and Miodrag Pavlović. Emotions, sense impressions, love, and fear make up the “mystery” behind Nastasijević’s poetry. In this book the mystery—the lyrical experience—is caught in its various aspects but never held too long or over-defined. Goy examines the language, music, and meaning of the poems in their original and through his own English translations. About the author: Edward Dennis Goy (1926–2000) was one of the preeminent British Slavists of the latter half of the twentieth century. He was a Cambridge (UK) scholar whose love affair with Nastasijević’s poetry lasted from 1966 to the end of his life. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (Monash University, Australia) has described him as “the best English translator of Nastasijević’s poetry” and one of Nastasijević’s “most prominent Western commentators” (Internet Journal Kritika, 2002). This book is recommended for library collections at four-year colleges and research universities.