“Some texts, after I’ve written them, have woken me up in the night so that I break out in a sweat and jump out of bed.” With this confession Bohumil Hrabal concludes Murder Ballads and Other Legends, a genre-bending collection of stories published at the height of the legendary author’s fame in the 1960s. Decades after escaping the Nazis as a child, a woman returns to Bohemia behind the wheel of a Ford Galaxie to retrieve her estate. A Prague tailor’s assistant sent halfway around the world delivers an extravagant report on the shops of New York. A village beauty rejects one suitor after another before meeting an unlucky end. Hrabal mines urban folk tales to deliver an array of blackly comical first-person yarns, airing comments from reader letters and wrestling with his newfound notoriety along the way. At the book’s heart is “The Legend of Cain,” an early version of the novella (and Oscar-winning film) Closely Watched Trains. Beautifully illustrated with woodcuts from early modern broadside ballads, Murder Ballads and Other Legends appears here in English for the first time, fifty years after it first appeared in Czech.Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) is regarded as one of the leading Czech prose stylists of the twentieth century. The son of a brewery’s bookkeeper, he earned a law degree before working as a train dispatcher, insurance agent, traveling salesman, steelworker, and theater stagehand. In the 1940s he joined the group Skupina 42 and began writing Surrealist poetry and short fiction. He achieved national success in 1963 with the short story collection Pearls of the Deep. Banned from official publishing in 1970, Hrabal gained an underground following in the 1970s and 1980s through samizdat and exile presses. His work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and in 1995 Publisher’s Weekly named him “the most revered living Czech writer.” He died in February 1997 after falling from his hospital window while feeding the pigeons. Timothy West received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University.

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.

Allan K. Wildman’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and lively personality influenced all who knew him. His interests ranged across workers, intellectuals, soldiers, and peasants, and across broad time periods. His students have built upon that to offer this collection of stimulating essays. The volume begins with a biographical sketch by two former colleagues and continues with eight essays by Wildman’s former students. They range from the military reforms of the mid-19th century to Polish revolutionaries in the early 20th century, from peasants in Viatka coping with revolutionary upheaval to ethnic and cultural tensions in Western Ukraine after annexation following World War II. They explore pre-revolutionary May Day symbolism, Komsomol youth in the building of the Moscow subway, and efforts to develop new Soviet attitudes toward hygiene and toward the roles of motherhood and fatherhood. Readers will find that in keeping with Wildman’s own works, these articles open new insights into Imperial Russian and Soviet history.

This book is Volume 4 of the  Allan K. Wildman Group Historical Series

From the Introduction: This volume honors the extraordinary life, path-breaking career, and pioneering scholarship of a truly modest woman—Professor Marina Viktorovna Ledkovsky, Barnard College emerita. Born into the old noble families of the Nabokovs, the Falz-Feins, the von Korffs, and the Fasolts, Marina Viktorovna grew up in Berlin, where, during World War II, she went to university, was arrested and released, got married, and had her first two children. In New York, where she emigrated after the war, she raised four children, taught French, resumed her education at Columbia University, and eventually joined the Russian Department at Barnard College, becoming one of the first woman professors at Columbia. Towards the end of her career, Marina Viktorovna completed her largest scholarly project: the indispensable Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994). [E]ssays [in this volume] … focus on women as the most important aspect in the following diverse areas of Marina Viktorovna’s research: nineteenth-century Russian literature, autobiography, Russian culture in emigration, and contemporary feminism in Russia. [D]ebates about the boundaries of Russian literature have shaped Russian literary history since the nineteenth century, but have again acquired force and urgency with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since the Dictionary’s publication in 1994, there has been renewed, sustained inquiry into Russian women writers and women in Russian culture. Yet this volume demonstrates that notions of women and gender in Russian literature, culture, religion, history, and politics have long been central not only to constructions of Russian national identity, but also to the fundamentally transnational nature of Russian culture since the eighteenth century. In fifteen essays that are nearly evenly divided between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century subjects on the one hand, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century subjects on the other, contributors cover some of the main areas of gender studies, encompassing transnational studies, cultural studies, the recovery of forgotten women, and the male canon. This book is recommended for library collections at four-year colleges and research universities.

My Petersburg/Myself is a study of the peculiar identification between Petersburg writers and urban space at the end of the imperial Petersburg tradition in Russian letters, a phenomenon unique in its complexity and intensity. Be it a private room, an imperial square or street, or an architectural monument, Petersburg writers from the beginning of the twentieth century and beyond expressed their biographical and creative selfhoods as intimately and dynamically bound up with the spaces of their often beleauguered city. This book presents a virtual typology of imaginative structures (of spatial poetics). Writers including Merezkovskij, Blok, Annenskij, Axmatova, Mandel'shtam, Nabokov, and Brodskij present the individual's existential/biographical experience in spatial, visual terms, each thereby constructing "my Petersburg." At the same time, the unique inner world of each poet humanizes the space, opening the way for a dialogic interaction between self and city. The authors argue that such identification of self with space is based in the mode of the elegy; the Petersburg elegy in its twentieth-century variety, however, has unexpected similarities to the idyll. Using generic theory as well as Bachelardian and Bakhtinian concepts of literary space-time, the authors demonstrate how the dark, destructive Petersburg of nineteenth-century tradition becomes russified and beloved in the twentieth century.

Book Reviews

Review in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, volume 41, issue 4, 2007: 485-486

Monastic Traditions represents the "Selected Proceedings" of the Fourth International Hilandar Conference, held 14Ð15 August 1998, on the campus of The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, as part of the worldwide commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the founding of Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos, Greece. Of the 21 papers and abstracts represented in this volume, 13 are directly related to Hilandar Monastery and its spiritual and cultural legacy. These papers address various aspects of Hilandar Monastery, including: icons in Hilandar (S. Djurić), engravings and etchings (S. Mileusnić); edicts (P. Milich); folk poetry (K. Vidaković Petrov), and poetry (M. Joković). The vast majority of the Hilandar-related presentations are, however, related to manuscripts: taksidioti and manuscripts of Hilandar (A. Dzhurova and V. Velinova); linguistic aspects (J. Grković-Major); Hilandar Menaia (E. Guergova); "newly-discovered Hilandar manuscripts" (I. V. Pozdeeva and A. A. Turilov); Porphyry Uspensky and his manuscript-related activity in Hilandar (F. J. Thomson); Gregory of Nyssa as reflected in Hilandar codices (F. J. Thomson); and Paterika in Hilandar and other Athonite Slavic monasteries (W. Veder). The remaining eight presentations address monasticism, monastic traditions, Slavic manuscripts, new trends in manuscript preservation and description: Novgorod Occupation Archive (P. Ambrosiani); use of computers and new opportunities for manuscript description (R. M. Clemison); the pre-Hilandar Serbian "library" (A. Corin); Athos in Muscovite monastic life (D. M. Goldfrank); orthographic rules in medieval Cyrillic manuscripts (C. M. MacRobert); database and preservation of Slavonic manuscripts in Macedonia (G. Mitrevski); 16th-century Muscovite church studies (D. Ostrowski); and the Greek workbook of Timofei Veniaminov (R. Romanchuk). 1998 was also the 20th anniversary of the Hilandar Research Library, a special collection of the OSU Libraries that originated with and houses microfilms of the Slavic manuscripts of Hilandar Monastery, as well as microforms of over two million pages of Cyrillic manuscripts from over 100 other collections. Per Ambrosiani:The Novgorod Occupation Archive in Stockholm; R. M. Cleminson: Codices, Catalogues, and Computers; Andrew R. Corin: Early Textual Transmission from Bulgaria to Northern Dalmatia: A Source for Reconstructing the Pre-Hilandar Serbian "Library"; Srdjan Djurić: Hilandar Icons from the 12th to the 17th Centuries: Tales and Themes; Aksiniia Dzhurova: The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Tradition of Hilandar Monastery Reflected in Newly Discovered Manuscripts of Its Samokov Dependency, "Protective Veil of the Theotokos" Convent in Samokov; Aksiniia Dzhurova and Vasia Velinova: A Description of the Slavic Manuscripts of the "Protective Veil of the Theotokos" Convent in Samokov - Part II; David M. Goldfrank: The Role and Image of Athos in Muscovite Monastic Life of the Late 15th and Early 16th Centuries; Jasmina Grković-Major: Compounds in Varlaam and Ioasaph: Hilandar Slavic Manuscript No. 422; Emilia Guergova: Old Slavic Menaia: Structure and Content; Miroljub Joković: The "Hilandar" Metaphor in Contemporary Serbian Poetry; C. M. MacRobert: On the Nature of Orthographiccal Rules in Medieval Cyrillic Manuscripts; Slobodan Mileusnić: Eighteenth-Century Engravings of Hilandar Monastery; Petar Milich: Hilandar Slavic Edict No. 139/141: Getting Beyond the DŽjć Connu; George Mitrevski: Computerized Database of Slavonic Manuscripts in Macedonia; Donald Ostrowski: Current State of Sixteenth-Century Muscovite Church Studies; Krinka Vidaković Petrov: Hilandar and the Holy Mount in the Oral Poetic Tradition; Irina V. Pozdeeva and A. A. Turilov: New Discoveries and Identifications of Manuscripts of the Hilandar Scriptorium; Robert Romanchuk: Once Again on the Greek Workbook of Timofei Veniaminov, Fifteenth-Century Novgorod Monk; Francis J. Thompson: The Works by or Ascribed to Gregory of Nyssa in the Hilandar Monastery Slavic Manuscript Collection together with a Few Remarks on the Slav Reception of Christianity; William R. Veder: The Slavic Paterika on Mount Athos: Features of Text Transmission in Church Slavic

Durst-Andersen develops a new conceptual framework for the clarification of the relations between verbal, sentential, and utterance meaning and aspectuality. The book takes up some of the hardest problems of Russian aspect usage, e.g., the usage of aspect in the infinitive, the imperative, and in connection with negation, and demonstrates that they are fully explanable and describable in terms of this new framework without resorting to ad hoc solutions. Durst-Andersen's approach is characterized by respect for both "internal" and "external" evidence, especially from language typology and language acquisition. The book consists of thirteen chapters divided into five parts. Part One, "Background," is devoted to an examination of previous attempts in general and in Russian linguistics to classify verbs on semantic grounds as well as to an examination and critique of previous theories of Russian aspect. Part Two, "The Deep Semantics of Verbs," contains the author's own solution to the meaning shared by the perfective and imperfective forms of verbs and presents the evidence for linking purely aspectual pairs to action verbs (involving two ground-propositions paired with two gound-situations) and so-called Aktionsart verbs to non-action verbs, i.e., state and activity verbs (involving a single ground-proposition paired with a single ground-situation). In Part Three, "The Structure of Mind," Durst-Andersen sets up a mental model of events and standard statement model of processes and derives a perfective statement model and an imperfective standard statement model from the two cognitive models. Part Four, "Inside the Russian Language," shows how the proposed grammar is put into practice and how it functions in utterances and yields statements which may be true or false, well-formed or ill-formed, and non-contradictory or contradictory corresponding to three different kinds of grammaticality and ungrammaticality. Part Five, "External Evidence," consists of the semiotic, pragmatic, and syntactic pieces of external evidence of the proposed theory. The author demonstrates that any imperative form used as a direct speech act consists of three speech acts corresponding to its preconditions, its dictum, and its postconditions, and in the final chapter he develops the basic systems of active, ergative, and accusative languages on the basis of his classification of verbs into state, activity, and action verbs. The book includes an extensive bibliography and a subject index.

"This intriguing book is to be highly recommended to all students of aspect." (SEER)

"Das hier vorgestellte Buch ist ein neuer und anregender Beitrag..." (Kritikon Litterarum)

This study provides a psychological investigation into the mother-son relationship in Russian folk and literary tradition. Beginning with the byliny, it examines the origins of the strong woman figure whose power over her sons results in their regressive behavior and inability to sever the oedipal ties with her. Hence the tales of Dobrynia and the Dragon, Vasilii Buslaev, and Sadkocan be seen not only as epic narratives but as symbolic explorations of the complex dialectic between mother and son. The complex relations between mother and son continue down into nineteenth century Russian literary tradition in the works of Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. While Pushkin's "Queen of Spades" continues the tradition of the strong woman figure whose oedipal influence over her son causes his ultimate demise, Dostoyevsky bequeathes a new image to the mother who, in The Adolescent, ultimately conquers through passivity and through the force of love. The image of the mother is thus seen as evolving from the aggressive phallic mother to one who represents the source of salvation for her sons. "...she provides stimulating interpretations of the individual works she treats. ... Barker's monograph is well written and thought-provoking." (SEEJ)

Since the seventeenth century was a critical period for the development of modern Russian, this study focusses on a relatively unified group of texts from one period and subjects them to a detailed and careful analysis. Constant comparisons to the situation in modern Russian are made. The six chapters are: Introduction; Non-prefixal pairs; Prefixal pairs; Parallel prefixation; Prefixal-suffixal pairs, and Biaspectual verbs. A thorough index of each verb form cited makes it easier to use this book as a source of information in future work. "This is a useful book which, with its comprehensive index of verb-forms, will have to be taken into account in all the work which remains to be done in the area in the future." (ISS) "Dr. Mayo's book forms a welcome addition to the literature on the development of Russian aspect. It is an equally valuable contribution to the study of the Russian literary language of the early seventeenth century." (SEER) "...edin cenen spravochnik za izsledovatelite na glagolnata morfologiia v istoriiata na ruskiia ezik." (SE)

Historians of the Russian revolution have paid little attention to the part played by the Mensheviks in the democracy that governed Russia from February 1917 to Lenin's coup d'etat in October. The only previous monograph on the Mensheviks in 1917 is a polemic published in Moscow which actually focuses on Lenin, and there is no description of the Menshevik party organization in 1917 in any language. Other published material on the Mensheviks in 1917 is almost as scanty. Basil's monograph is based upon extensive use of both primary and secondary sources, and it illuminates an interesting, but inadequately-studied, aspect of 1917. "...balanced and cogent narrative..." (ISS)

From the Brown University Slavic Reprint Series: "Mechta i mysl'... has remained in the front rank of Turgenev studies. Gershenzon's work is a luminous and intuitive examination of the relationship between Turgenev's art and his personality, and of the pervading theme that unites Turgenev's work to that of other nineteenth-century Russian writers."