The Look of Russian Literature


Book Description

Gerald Janecek describes the experiments in visual, literature conducted from 1900 to 1930, the heyday of the Russian Avant Garde. Focusing on an aspect of Russian literary history that has previously been almost ignored, he shows how Russian writers of this period tried unusual methods to make their texts visually interesting or expressive. The book includes 183 illustrations, most from rare publications and many reproduced for the first time. The author discusses such figures as the Symbolist Andrey Bely, the Futurists Aleksey Kruchonykh, Vasili Kamensky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the post-Futurist Ilya Zdanevich, and their use of devices ranging from unorthodox layouts and florid typography to roughly done lithographed or handmade books. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Kotik Letaev


Book Description

A Russian novel which looks at childhood, seen through the eyes of a boy from the age of three to five years, in the 1800s.




Andrey Bely


Book Description

No figure in turn-of-the-century Russia, John Malmstad asserts, better epitomizes the paradoxes of that era than Andrey Bely (1880–1934). Eulogized by Boris Pasternak as "the most remarkable writer of our age" and now widely regarded as the seminal figure in Russian modernism and as one of the major writers of this century, Bely subjected the received standards of truth and value in literature to a penetrating and radical critique. After a long period of suppression under the Stalinist regime, Bely has become the object of growing critical attention in both East and West. Originating in a symposium held in 1984 under the auspices of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University on the fiftieth anniversary of Bely's death, this volume includes ten essays by established scholars of modern Russian literature, including leading Western specialists on Bely. The essays survey Bely's major works in all genres, summarize present research on Bely, reassess critical approaches, and offer fresh interpretations. Analytic summaries of primary works make the essays fully accessible to non-Slavist readers.




A History of Russian Symbolism


Book Description

The era of Russian Symbolism (1892-1917) has been called the Silver Age of Russian culture, and even the Second Golden Age. Symbolist authors are among the greatest Russian authors of this century, and their activities helped to foster one of the most significant advances in cultural life (in poetry, prose, music, theater, and painting) that has ever been seen there. This book is designed to serve as an introduction to Symbolism in Russia, as a movement, an artistic method, and a world view. The primary emphasis is on the history of the movement itself. Attention is devoted to what the Symbolists wrote, said, and thought, and on how they interacted. In this context, the main actors are the authors of poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, but space is also devoted to the important connections between literary figures and artists, philosophers, and the intelligentsia in general. This broad, detailed and balanced account of this period will serve as a standard reference work an encourage further research among scholars and students of literature.




Voiceless Vanguard


Book Description

Winner, 2015 International Research Society in Children's Literature (IRSCL) Book Award Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde offers a new approach to the Russian avant-garde. It argues that central writers, artists, and theorists of the avant-garde self-consciously used an infantile aesthetic, as inspired by children’s art, language, perspective, and logic, to accomplish the artistic renewal they were seeking in literature, theory, and art. It treats the influence of children’s drawings on the Neo-Primitivist art of Mikhail Larionov, the role of children’s language in the Cubo-Futurist poetics of Aleksei Kruchenykh, the role of the naive perspective in the Formalist theory of Viktor Shklovsky, and the place of children’s logic and lore in Daniil Kharms’s absurdist writings for children and adults. This interdisciplinary and cultural study not only illuminates a rich period in Russian culture but also offers implications for modernism in a wider Western context, where similar principles apply.




Reference Guide to Russian Literature


Book Description

First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.




Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis


Book Description

This is a collection of psychoanalytical essays on a broad spectrum of well-known Russian authors, such as Puskin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Belyj, Tjutcev, Axmatova, and Nabokov. The volume includes some reprints, among which a contribution by Sigmund Freud on Dostoevsky and Parricide'. The majority of the contributions are original publications by present-day specialists in the field. This is a book which may benefit literary scholars as well as professional psychoanalysts.




On the Theory of Prose


Book Description

As time has proven, Theory of Prose still remains one of the twentieth century’s most significant works of literary theory. It not only anticipates structuralism and poststructuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today as they were in the 1920s. Founded on the concept of “making strange,” it lays bare the inner workings of fiction—especially the works of Cervantes, Tolstoy, Sterne, Dickens, Bely and Rozanov—and imparts a new way of seeing, of reading, and of interacting with the world.




Audrey Bely


Book Description

This book traces the development of Audrey Bely's technique as a novelist from the early experimental Symphonies, to the last novel, Masks.