In this monograph the authors assert that Russian verbal prefixes always express meaning, even when they are used to form the perfective partners of aspectual pairs. The prefixes in verbs like написать/na-pisat' 'write' and сварить/s-varit' 'cook' have semantic purpose, even though the corresponding imperfective verbs писать/pisat' 'write' and варить/varit' 'cook' have the same lexical meanings. This suggests a new hypothesis, namely that the Russian verbal prefixes function as verb classifiers, parallel to numeral classifiers. The exposition is designed to be theory-neutral and accessible to both linguists and nonlinguists. The studies make use of quantitative research on corpus data and statistical models (chisquare, logistic regression, etc.), which are presented in a common-sense way that assumes no special expertise. A user-friendly interactive webpage at http://emptyprefixes.uit.no/book.htm houses links to the authors' database, plus additional data from the studies cited. This book narrates recent breakthroughs in research on Russian aspect and demonstrates a range of methodologies designed to probe the relationship between the meaning and distribution of linguistic forms. These methodologies are used to investigate the "empty" prefixes, alternating constructions, prefix variation, and aspectual triplets. Though these phenomena have long been known to exist, their extent and behavior have not been previously explored in detail. The authors propose that the verbal prefixes select verbs according to broad semantic traits, categorizing them the way numeral classifiers categorize nouns. The purpose of the prefixes is to convert amorphous states and activities into discrete events and to group verbs according to the types of events they express. In other words, Russian prefixes are in effect a verb classifier system similar to those proposed for Mandarin Chinese, Hindi-Urdu, and a number of Australian languages, and this hypothesis facilitates cross-linguistic comparisons. The description of Russian prefixes as a verb classifier system furthermore has pedagogical value since curricula may be redesigned to teach students the system according to its meaningful groupings rather than simply requiring them to memorize hundreds of combinations of prefixes with simplex verbs. In short, the proposal to recognize Russian prefixes as verb classifiers supports the community of people interested in Russian grammar to be better linguists, better instructors, and better learners.

What You Always Wanted to Know about Russian Grammar (*But Were Afraid to Ask) begins where textbooks and conventional grammars leave off: with the perplexing, poorly explained, often maddening aspects of Russian that drive English-speaking students and even their teachers and professors crazy! The author provides authoritative and thoroughly researched answers to 65 thorny questions submitted over a 10-year period by the readers of her regular column in the newsletter of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). Many of the questions deal with puzzling (quasi-)synonyms: when do I say this and when do I say that, and why? Other questions deal with contradictions: why does the textbook tell me to say this, but native speakers of Russian say that? Or why do older Russians say this, but younger Russians say that? In answering these questions, Dr. Israeli, a native speaker, draws on her decades of linguistic scholarship, lifelong love of puzzles, and general sense of humor to present the clearest, easiest-to-understand, and most humorous explanations of Russian grammar that you will ever read, most of them supported with real-life examples drawn from historical and contemporary prose, media, and the Internet. If you are an advanced student or instructor of Russian who has been struggling with the finer points of Russian grammar (and who among us hasn't?), this book is for you!

Alina Israeli was born and grew up in what she still calls Leningrad. From an early age she was fond of problems and puzzles and ended up in a mathematical high school and then at the math department at Leningrad University. Meanwhile (that is from a very early age) she was studying foreign languages: first French, then English, later Italian and Polish. Eventually she realized that she had confused her love of puzzles and logic with a love of math and became a student in the Russian department at Leningrad State University, where she began studying linguistics. In the mid-1970s she emigrated under the pretense of going to Israel (where she has never been to this day) and arrived in the US where she soon started studying Slavic linguistics at Yale. Ever since, she has been teaching Russian to Americans, which presented an interesting and never ending puzzle, bits of which she unravels in this book.

Book Reviews

Review in Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 55, no. 1/2, 2013: 252-253

Review in Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 57, no. 4, 2013: 701-702

An exploration of the extent to which worker religious identity was trans–formed by the experience of urban factory life, Working Souls also examines how the spiritual needs and demands of working-class laity precipitated changes in the practice of Orthodoxy, enabling the faith to “survive” in the urban factory environment—not just as a remnant of rural consciousness and practice, but as an evolving and sometimes essential dimension of worker culture. In spite of the central role played by worker-atheists in the revolutionary narratives of 1905 and 1917, the majority of Russian workers in the late Imperial era continued to view their lives and the society around them through the prism of religious belief, even in St. Petersburg, the most secularized and radical city in the Empire. This book is devoted to their story; it gives voice and visibility to workers who reacted to the material and spiritual poverty of the “modern” factory in fundamentally religious, though often un-Orthodox, ways. This study explores the extent to which the various components of workers’ religious identity—their practices, sensibilities, communities, and beliefs about God, self, and society—were transformed by the experience of urban factory life.

At the same time, it looks at the myriad ways in which the spiritual needs and demands of the working-class laity precipitated changes in the practice of Orthodoxy—how rituals were adapted, identities reshaped and communities restructured—enabling the faith to “survive” in the urban factory environment not just as an archaic remnant of rural consciousness and practice, but as an evolving and sometimes essential dimension of worker culture. No less importantly, this book focuses on the response of the Orthodox clergy to workers’ religious and spiritual struggles, emphasizing the moral complexities posed by crisis of labor in 1905. Finally, Working Souls highlights the religious dimensions of the emerging labor and revolutionary movements, and in so doing, reveals important intellectual and moral parallels between the popular spiritual and political revolutions of 1905–17.

“Well-written, broadly researched, and insightful, this book offers a sensitive, multifaceted exploration of religiosity in the Russian working class in the turbulent revolutionary years of the early twentieth century.” ~ Gregory Freeze

“Based on ‘new and fascinating material, drawn from archives, the contemporary religious press, and memoirs,’ it ‘constitutes a sensitive and nuanced reconstruction of the texture of worker religious culture in St. Petersburg in the last decades of the old regime,’ and ‘illuminates vital aspects of the history of labor in late-imperial Russia that were seriously neglected in the heyday of labor history.” ~ Steve Smith

This book is Volume 2 of the  Allan K. Wildman Group Historical Series

The Will to Chance: Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-Garde from Poetism to Surrealism is the first monograph study on the Czech avant-garde that positions the Czech movements of poetism and surrealism at the radical center of debates on what the avant-garde was, is, and can be. It is motivated by post-structuralist theory to ascertain what indeed constitutes the avant-garde in and of itself. The overarching inquiry of the book is that raised by Peter BŸrger in his seminal if imperfect Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984): "The theory of the avant-garde cannot wholly dispense with the study of chance for it is of decisive importance for the self-understanding of the Surrealist movement, at the very least. One will therefore view the category with the meaning the Surrealists gave it as an ideological one that permits scholars to understand the intention of the movement but simultaneously makes it their task to criticize it" (BŸrger 66). Though BŸrger subsumes his discussion of chance to other considerations (montage foremost among them) what BŸrger does say about chance turns the fulcrum of what I see as the avant-gardeÕs totalizing designs. More than a preoccupation with the new or the vernacular of shocking the bourgeoisie, I argue, the obsession with chance and its objective meaning delimits the ideology of the avant-garde. About the Author: Malynne Sternstein is an Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the College. Her interests include Czech Literature and Culture, Russian Literature, Avant-Grade Studies, Central European Studies, Literary, Psychoanalytic and Cultural Theory, Art and Media Theory, The "Retro-Avant-garde," and Czech Film.

Written to accompany Charles E. Gribble's Russian Root List, this workbook is intended as a study and teaching aid to facilitate the effective learning of roots, prefixes, and suffixes. "V posobii sobran obshirnyi i raznoobraznyi slovarnyi material, kotoryi mozhet byt' ispol'zovan prepodavatelem dlia sostavleniia vsevozmozhnykh uprazhnenii v slovoobrazovanii." (SE)

Bogert's book studies the most culturally and politically influential Yugoslav intellectual of the twentieth century with emphasis on interpreting this many-sided modernist, the most prolific and arguably the most important author writing in Serbo-Croatian in this century, with reference to Central European and South Slavic literary traditions. Informed by recent directions in literary theory and philosophy, cultural and social history, and transgeneric textual criticism, this is a major contribution to scholarship on Krlezha. Drawing extensively on more than one hundred primary texts, with all quotations from the original accompanied by English translation, the book examines in detail Krlezha's non-fiction writing, especially his key essays on art, science, creativity and culture. It traces the philosophical link between ethics and aesthetics from the critical legacy of fin de siecle -- pseudofeuilletonism and Sprachkritik -- to the catastrophist concerns Krlezha shared with Ady, Andric, Kraus, Lukács, Musil, Wittgenstein, and other Central European writers and thinkers. The book analyzes in depth the texts of Krlezha's Glembay prose and drama cycle, his group of works most relevant to the social and spiritual conditions of post-imperial Central Europe. Bogert synthesizes Krlezha's independent view of the committed creative imagination by defining the basis of his literary aesthetics and explaining his original conception of the "resonant aesthetic subject," "syncope," "clean palette," and "thematic substance" as seen in Dostoevsky, Lenin, Meshtrovic, Picasso, and Proust. He goes on to describe Krlezha's defiant use of these theoretical concepts during the conflict on the literary left as it played itself out in Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, including an account of his dramatic clash with Dzhilas, Tito, and other communist ideologues and a discussion of the brilliant two-pronged polemical and belletristic strategy Krlezha employed in his novels, stories, poems, and plays to refute the doctrine of socially engineered art and bring about the earliest demise of Socialist Realism anywhere in Eastern Europe. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography and three indices.

"...a worthy contribution... It gives new insights and raises new questions...." (SR)

"...impressive study ... deserves to be read by a wider audience outside the Slavonic academic world." (MLR)

"...highly recommended for those who care passionately about literature and culture, and for those who enjoy thought-provoking, conscientious, and truly intellectual scholarship." (SEEJ)

This book of readings is intended for students of Russian who have had at least one semester of study. It has a glossary and notes on facing pages and a complete glossary at the end. The copiously illustrated text of this book is a copy of portions of the 1939 edition. The original book was intended as a children's encyclopedia embedded in a lively and engaging story. It is an excellent source of common nouns and verbs (particularly verbs of motion) that rarely occur in such abundance in an ordinary literary work. The language of the book reflects the style of conversational Russian; the sentences are short, free of participial constructions, and often elliptical.

Additional Materials

Additional materials for this title are available through the Cornell Language Resource Center.

Book Reviews

"...a wonderfully innovative addition to the growing stock of intermediate Russian readers. It provides an engaging context for the introduction of common colloquial style without burdening the reader with superfluous material and lengthy grammatical explanations. ...the editors must be applauded for their development of this work into a valuable and enjoyable instructional tool." (SEEJ)

"...may be considered a useful supplement to encourage beginning students to start reading. The task will be much easier because the vocabulary notes provided are quite helpful and the end glossary complete." (MLJ)