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.

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.

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.

"I believe that thanks to this translation The Cathedral Clergy will have an uplifting effect on the English reader as well." —Review in Canadian Slavonic Papers

Nikolay Leskov, a contemporary of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, has remained largely unknown in the West. A master storyteller and connoisseur of language, Leskov drew on his provincial background and extensive travels throughout the empire as a businessman to depict a Russia quite different from that of his aristocratic peers, earning him the reputation of the most Russian of Russian writers. The publication of his masterpiece, The Cathedral Clergy, in 1872 marked the beginning of the author’s lasting popularity among his countrymen, who were captivated by its superb storytelling, its living, breathing characters from all classes of society, its wit and humor, its fresh style, and its treatment of spiritual themes. Leskov’s fictitious Old Town is a microcosm of rural Russia; his chief protagonists, Father Savely and Deacon Achilles, two of the most famous characters in Russian literature, are unforgettable. As beloved by Russians as the works of Leskov’s better known fellow writers, The Cathedral Clergy offers, in its unusual subject matter and unconventional structure, a unique approach to the Russian Realist novel. This “chronicle,” as the author called it, is difficult to categorize. Largely realistic, even naturalistic in places, it also waxes lyrical, particularly in its gripping descriptions of nature. It is the tale of a town, an adventure story, a love story (of a happy marriage), a life of a modern martyr, a comedy as well as a tragedy. Given its vivid style, rife with archaisms, colloquialisms, mispronunciations, dialect words, folklore, songs, intentionally bad poetry, and puns, The Cathedral Clergy has proven nearly impossible to translate. This expert annotated translation, however, now affords English speakers the pleasure of discovering a nineteenth-century Russian novel that Russian readers have long since considered a classic.

On the 2012 Rossica Translation Prize Shortlist 

Book Reviews

Review in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011, pp.608-610

No major Russian author has been more thoroughly translated into American culture than the master of the short story, playwright, and socially committed physician Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). Chekhov’s writings and his person have had an exceptionally strong hold on the American imagination since the first British translations of his work crossed the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. Many distinguished American authors have openly acknowledged Chekhov’s influence and responded to him in their own writings, and as a playwright Chekhov figures second only to Shakespeare in the frequency of performances on American stages. Physicians with an interest in literature have been particularly drawn to the life and writings of Chekhov, and he figures prominently in thinking and teaching in the new field of medical humanities. This interdisciplinary volume issues from a 2004 symposium, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), marking the centennial of Chekhov’s death. Contributors include the most outstanding American translators of Chekhov’s prose and drama, leading Chekhov literary scholars, historians, theater critics and artists, prominent authors of fiction and popular criticism, and physicians and other health-care professionals. The articles and transcripts of roundtables and interviews in this volume reflect on the various angles of vision that have produced the Chekhov—or, more accurately, Chekhovs—we now know. Together they ask: if for Russians Chekhov arguably defines what it is to be a humanist in the modern era, what have the man and his writings meant in the American cultural context, particularly in the last quarter century, and how and why has this varied across disciplinary boundaries? Ultimately, such questions lead to more fundamental ones about the humanities. This volume is recommended for four-year college courses and research university libraries.

A decade of research on Russian case semantics has come together in a valuable new pedagogical tool through the work of Laura Janda and Steven Clancy. The Case Book for Russian, a textbook and exercises, presents the Russian case system in terms of structured semantic wholes. This method of explanation is easily accessible to students and provides a coherent conceptual framework that accounts for the rich and often confusing details of Russian case usage. Throughout the text, the basic meanings of the cases are illustrated with examples from a large database of Russian prose, compiled specifically for this project. Examples in the text and exercises were taken from a variety of sources (primarily books and newspapers of the past decade) and are representative of multiple genres and fields (fiction, current events, contemporary history, politics, law, economics, science and medicine, etc.). By confronting real case samples in an unadulterated form, students can learn to make sense of the systematic meanings of case in a fashion that will approach the understanding of a native speaker. The accompanying exercises continue the presentation of the text and challenge students to implement the concepts they have learned. The interactive version (CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows platforms) contains recordings of all examples by both male and female native speakers. As students work through the exercises, they can consult the electronic version of the text for quick reference and can print out summary sheets of completed assignments to hand in for class. This book can be used at various levels of study (intermediate through very advanced), and can be used alone or in conjunction with any other materials. The Case Book for Russian can also be used for independent study by anyone interested in maintaining and improving their Russian.

Winner, 2005 AATSEEL Award for Best Contribution to Language Pedagogy (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages)

Townsend and Janda's book provides a thorough description of the phonology and inflection of Late Common Slavic with copious background on its precursors and a detailed survey of its stages of development. The comparative approach is blended in from the beginning, with particular attention paid to Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian continuations in both phonology and inflection. Nine chapters cover the basic material of the book, which includes such phenomena as the ruki rule, the satem-centum distinction, rising sonority, syllabic synharmony, prosodic features, ablaut, declension, and conjugation. The tenth chapter consists of brief characterizations of the phonology of each of the five languages emphasized, complete with their phonological inventories and the most salient features of their inflectional patterns. The book's orientation is structural and traditional, yet also modern and innovative in certain ways. One of its unique features is its analysis of phonological developments in terms of Jakobsonian distinctive features, which are introduced in detail in the first chapter and then used to explain sonority and tonality adjustments in the phonology. Also unique is the detailed breakdown of the development of Slavic declensions (nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals) and verb classes, treated from both one-stem and traditional points of view. Common and Comparative Slavic will make a superb textbook for courses on the history of Slavic and the five languages it emphasizes, but there are also new formulations which should make the book of interest to the specialist as well as the teacher and graduate student. Common and Comparative Slavic will be an excellent source for students of the Slavic languages who want to learn more about where the modern languages came from and how they differ from one another. It will be just as suitable for reading on one's own as it is for class work. Since it does not presume a deep knowledge of Slavic in advance, it will moreover serve students of general linguistics, Germanic, Romance, etc. who wish to look over the fence and see how another Indo-European language family evolved.

This is a different type of phrase book: it is not intended primarily for travelers, but rather for all students of Russian, from the elementary through advanced levels. The sample page reprinted on the opposite page of this catalog gives an idea of the structure of the book: it is divided into 84 categories, and within each category a mixture of individual words, phrases, and whole sentences are given. Each category is taken in a broad sense to include related words and concepts, synonyms, and antonyms. Categories most frequently take up one or two pages, with a few covering three pages. The text is completely stressed, making it much more useful for the learner. Imperfective and perfective pairs for the verb are given, and verbal government is indicated. Both feminine and masculine forms are given in most cases, especially for nouns and short-form adjectives. Karras' book gives all students, from beginning to advanced, a starting point for conversations, and it gives intermediate and advanced students a source to fill in the gaps in their vocabulary and phraseology. Categories covered in the book include: advice, age, anger, appointment, argument, arts, book, business, car, clothes, country, crime, criticism, death, face, family, farm, farm animals, fear, food, friend, gossip, hair, happiness, hate, health, help, house, ignorance, illness, income, information, injuries, insult, job, knowledge, landforms, language, letter, life, love, marriage, military, minerals, money, movie, natural disaster, news, newspaper, opinion, pets, physique, plant, politics, price, pride, problem, protest, rain, recreation, religion, road, school, seasons, shopping, space, special occasion, speech, sports, telephone, transportation, travel, tree, vacation, vices, virtue, vocations, walk/run, war, water, weapons, weather, word, zoo. If you travel to Russia, you will find this book useful; if you simply want to improve your Russian, you will find it indispensable!

This unique achievement in the cataloging of medieval Slavic Cyrillic manuscripts provides 1,842 catalog records and over two hundred pages of unified indices representing medieval manuscript material brought together on microform in the Hilandar Research Library of The Ohio State University. The originals of the materials span twenty-one collections housed in various countries, most notably much of the Slavic manuscript material on Mount Athos. The catalog records are preceded by a detailed Introduction which provides a history of the Hilandar Research Library (HRL) and visions for its future, as well as specific details about the contents of the catalog records and the indices. While bringing together information from a large variety of existing finding aids, the records also often present new, as yet unpublished, information provided by scholars as they worked in the HRL, especially for the musical manuscripts or pertaining to scribal attribution. The compilers have made a concerted effort to meld the requirements of American librarianship (the use of AACR2, LCSH, etc.) with that of medieval Slavic scholarship as evidenced in existing catalogs and finding aids. By presenting the descriptions in a standardized cataloging format, it was possible to make the catalog records accessible in OCLC and in Ohio State's on-line catalog (LCS), a project funded primarily through Title II-C of the National Education Act. While the publication of the printed Catalog is especially indispensible for scholars and institutions which do not have on-line access to Ohio State's LCS system or to OCLC, this publication is an invaluable reference tool to what comprises some 80% of the medieval microform holdings of the HRL, unique in North America.

"...splendid catalog..." (F. J. Thomson)

"...heroic accomplishment..." (J. G. Plante)

"...valuable contribution to the study of the Slavic medieval manuscript heritage..." (Paleobulgarica XV)

Contents

Dedication     5

Acknowledgement     10

 Preface by Albert Bates Lord     11

 Introduction (John Miles Foley)     15

Essays

Franz H. Bauml

 "The Theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition and the Written Medieval Text"     29

Daniel P. Biebuyck

 "Names in Nyanga Society and in Nyanga Tales     47

John W. Butcher

 "Formulaic Invention in the Genealogies of the Old English Genesis A"     73

David E. Bynum

"Of Stick and Stones and Hapax Legomena Themata"     93

Martin Camargo

"Oral Traditional Structure in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"

Robert P. Creed

 "Beowulf on the Brink: Information Theory as Key to the Origins of the Poem"     139

Ruth H. Firestone

 "On the Similarity of Biterolf und Dietleib and Dietrich und Wenezlan"     161

John Miles Foley

"Reading the Oral Traditional Text: Aesthetics of Creation and Response"     185

Donald K. Fry

"The Cliff of Death in Old English Poetry"     213

Edward R. Haymes

"'ez wart ein buoch funden': Oral and Written in Middle High German Heroic Epic"    235

Constance B. Hieatt

"On Envelope Patterns (Ancient Greek and -Relatively- Modern) and Nonce Formulas"     245

Edward B. Irving Jr.

"What to Do with Old Kings"     259

 Elaine Lawless

"Tradition and Poetics: The Folk Sermons of Women Preachers"     269

 Albert Bates Lord

"The Nature of Oral Poetry"     313

D. Gary Miller

 Towards a New Model of Formulaic Compostion"    351

 Stephen A. Mitchell

"The Sagaman and Oral Literature: The Icelandic Traditions of Hjorleifr inn kvensami and Geirmundr heljarskinn"     395

 Michale N. Nagler

"On Almost Killing Your Friends: Some Thoughts on Violence in Early Cultures"     425

Joseph Falaky Nagy

"The Sign of the Outlaw: Multiformity in Fenian Narrative"     465

 Alexandra Hennessey Olsen

"Literary Artistry and the Oral-Formulaic Tradition: The Case of Gower's Appolinus of Tyre     493

Ward Parks

"Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission"     511

Alain Renoir

 "Repetition, Oral-Formulaic Style, and Affective Impact in Mediaeval Poetry: A Tentative Illustration"     533

Joseph A. Russo

 "Oral Style as Performance Style in Homer's Odyssey: Should We Read Homer Differently after Parry?"     549

Geoffrey R. Russom

 "Verse Translations and the Question of Literacy in Beowulf

Ruth H. Webber

"Ballad Openings in the Eropean Balad"     581

This bibliography is a record of three hundred and eighty-eight years of translations and criticism of Yugoslav literatures in English. It covers all literature that has been written within the boundaries of Yugoslavia and abroad. It is an all-inclusive rather than selective bibliography. The book is a greatly revised, supplemented, and updated version of Yugoslav Literature in English: A Bibliography of Translations and Criticism (1821-1975), published by Slavica in 1976 and long out of print. Reviews of the first book were uniformly favorable; this new work has taken into account criticisms, corrections, and additions from those reviews as well as from a large number of other sources; it has also added 233 years to the span of time covered. The Comprehensive Bibliography will be a basic reference for generations to come. It will not be republished in a new edition, but additional volumes are planned every five years to give updates and additional material (see below for the first and second supplements). Part One (Translations): Folk Literature; Individual Writers; Part Two (Criticism): Entries in Reference Works; Books and Articles; Reviews; Dissertations; Part Three (Indices): English Titles or First Lines of Translations; Original Titles or First Lines of Originals; Periodicals and Newspapers; Subjects; Names. There are 5255 entries in the book. "A must for most academic libraries." (Choice) "This excellent volume does indeed seem to live up to its title." (MLR) "For all in Yugoslav studies, it is an indispensable tool of reference and orientation." (SEEJ) "Chitanje ove sjajno uradene bibliografije..." (Knjizhevni Glasnik Nin)

UCLA Slavic Studies no. 3

This textbook aims to give the beginning student a solid working knowledge of the literary language. It consists of two parts: a grammar and a series of review lessons. The grammar is designed to be covered in one semester and students will be able to master the essentials of the language because the first part avoids nearly all irregularities. They can therefore devote their efforts to the basic patterns rather than the exceptions. Once the students have worked their way through the grammar section, they are ready to begin reading. The texts can be chosen according to the students' interests. Along with the readings the review lessons serve both to foster an active knowledge of basic forms and constructions and to introduce the most common irregularities. "...can be recommended to everyone ... as the best introductory course currently available." (MLJ) "This book has been thoughtfully and intelligently compiled, is well designed, and contains few printing errors. It is to be welcomed as a very useful aid to those learning Czech from scratch." (MLR)

An intermediate-advanced textbook for students who have been through a full-sized elementary text and have been exposed to the more basic morphological patterns and a first-year vocabulary. In addition, the quantity and range of grammatical information contained in its twenty-five lessons, the comprehensive Russian and English word references in the General Vocabulary, and the Index make it an excellent reference book during and long after any Russian course in which it is used.

The so-called "superflous man" plays an important role in many major works of Russian literature, including those of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Doestoevsky, Chekhov, and Pasternak. Chances analyzes the broad cultural and literary implications of the term, shedding new light on our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russian literature in terms of conformity and non-conformity. She places the superflous man within its Russian Historical and cultural context and with a cross-cultural framework (including American and Western European).

Chances argues that even in the writings of those authors who are considered pro-individualist, there are examples of superflous men who are killed off, literally or figuratively, and of conformists who are placed on a pedestal precisley because they conform to a societal or metaphysical order. She also discusses works in which superflous men are praised precisely because they do not conform. She demonstrates that from the beginning of the tradition, there were two types of superflous men, a societal misfit and a methaphysical one. Chances also argues for extending the definition of the superflous man to include characters that are not usually considered part of the tradition. Thus, Socialest Realism, in certain ways, can be seen as a continuation of the mainstream tradition of Russian literature.