Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature


Book Description

Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, a leading specialist in Russia’s Jewish culture, this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people’s history. A living record of the rich and vibrant legacy of Russia’s Jews, this reader-friendly and comprehensive anthology features original English translations. In its selection and presentation, the anthology tilts in favor of human interest and readability. It is organized both chronologically and topically (e.g. “Seething Times: 1860s-1880s”; “Revolution and Emigration: 1920s-1930s”; “Late Soviet Empire and Collapse: 1960s-1990s”). A comprehensive headnote introduces each section. Individual selections have short essays containing information about the authors and the works that are relevant to the topic. The editor’s opening essay introduces the topic and relevant contexts at the beginning of the volume; the overview by the leading historian of Russian Jewry John D. Klier appears the end of the volume. Over 500,000 Russian-speaking Jews presently live in America and about 1 million in Israel, while only about 170,000 Jews remain in Russia. The great outflux of Jews from the former USSR and the post-Soviet states has changed the cultural habitat of world Jewry. A formidable force and a new Jewish Diaspora, Russian Jews are transforming the texture of daily life in the US and Canada, and Israel. A living memory, a space of survival and a record of success, Voice of Jewish-Russian Literature ensures the preservation and accessibility of the rich legacy of Russian-speaking Jews.




The Voice Over


Book Description

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.




Voices from the Soviet Edge


Book Description

Jeff Sahadeo reveals the complex and fascinating stories of migrant populations in Leningrad and Moscow. Voices from the Soviet Edge focuses on the hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and others who arrived toward the end of the Soviet era, seeking opportunity at the privileged heart of the USSR. Through the extensive oral histories Sahadeo has collected, he shows how the energy of these migrants, denigrated as "Blacks" by some Russians, transformed their families' lives and created inter-republican networks, altering society and community in both the center and the periphery of life in the "two capitals." Voices from the Soviet Edge connects Leningrad and Moscow to transnational trends of core-periphery movement and marks them as global cities. In examining Soviet concepts such as "friendship of peoples" alongside ethnic and national differences, Sahadeo shows how those ideas became racialized but could also be deployed to advance migrant aspirations. He exposes the Brezhnev era as a time of dynamism and opportunity, and Leningrad and Moscow not as isolated outposts of privilege but at the heart of any number of systems that linked the disparate regions of the USSR into a whole. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union crumbled, migration increased. These later migrants were the forbears of contemporary Muslims from former Soviet spaces who now confront significant discrimination in European Russia. As Sahadeo demonstrates, the two cities benefited from 1980s' migration but also became communities where racism and exclusion coexisted with citizenship and Soviet identity.




Boris Eikhenbaum


Book Description

This is the first book-length study of Boris Eikhenbaum (1886-1959), a leading Russian Formalist and a pathbreaking Tolstoy scholar. The author carefully traces Eikhenbaum's intellectual trajectory from his pre-Formalist "philosophical" criticism, through Formalism to his later biographical criticism of Tolstoy and Lermontov. Eikhenbaum's contribution to Formalism has not heretofore received clear definition, and the author shows that his ideas and influence were even greater than previously supposed. His shift away from Formalism, with its emphasis on purely literary analysis, toward a criticism that emphasized the writer as a cultural figure is seen as a response to both political exigency and personal need. Although by the late 1910's Formalism had become poetics non grata in the Soviet Union, the author demonstrates that Eikhenbaum also had compelling intellectual reasons to move away from Formalism, which had reached a dead end. The author asserts that Eikhenbaum prolonged his scholarly life by concentrating on nineteenth-century Russian authors whose moral opposition to mainstream Russian intellectual thought served as a model for his own ethical stance in Stalin's Russia. This is particularly true of his monumental three-volume work on Tolstoy, which in its own way has been as influential as his Formalist writings. Throughout, the author relates Eikhenbaum's critical thinking to such current literary issues as intention, perception, meaning, reader reception, deconstruction, and the New Historicism.




Toxic Voices


Book Description

Satire and the fantastic, vital literary genres in the 1920s, are often thought to have fallen victim to the official adoption of socialist realism. Eric Laursen contends that these subversive genres did not just vanish or move underground. Instead, key strategies of each survive to sustain the villain of socialist realism. Laursen argues that the judgment of satire and the hesitation associated with the fantastic produce a narrative obsession with controlling the villain’s influence. In identifying a crucial connection between the questioning, subversive literature of the 1920s and the socialist realists, Laursen produces an insightful revision of Soviet literary history.




Russian Voices


Book Description

The author has spent the last twelve months in Moscow, interviewing wherever he went, and everywhere finding people eager to exercise their new freedom to speak without fear. From their words he builds a picture of the Soviet Union today, a picture which includes an old lady selling newspapers in the street, the manager of the huge and internationally famous GUM Department Store, a stagehand at the Bolshoi Theatre, and the Director of the USSR's first McDonald's hamburger bar. He spoke to a World War two tank commander, an Army veteran recently returned from Afghanistan, to hippies and pacifists, as well as meeting a chess Grandmaster, a beauty queen, a private detective, and drinking tea for two hours in the Lubianka with officers of the KGB.




Voices in the Snow


Book Description

"Leonid Andreyev's grandaughter describes her meetings with Pasternak, Sholokhov, Ehrenburg, Evtushenko and young Soviet artists."--Taken from dust jacket.




Secondhand Time


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia, from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul.” Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation. In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres—but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world. A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the human spirit woven by a master, Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. “Through the voices of those who confided in her,” The Nation writes, “Alexievich tells us about human nature, about our dreams, our choices, about good and evil—in a word, about ourselves.” A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Financial Times, Kirkus Reviews




Contemporary Russian Poetry


Book Description

This book consists of the work of twenty-three poets, living in Russia and abroad and writing during the period since 1975. It is the first dual-language anthology in many years.




Photographic Literacy


Book Description

Photography, introduced to Russia in 1839, was nothing short of a sensation. Its rapid proliferation challenged the other arts, including painting and literature, as well as the very integrity of the self. If Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky greeted the camera with skepticism in the nineteenth century, numerous twentieth-century authors welcomed it with a warm embrace. As Katherine M. H. Reischl shows in Photographic Literacy, authors as varied as Leonid Andreev, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn picked up the camera and reshaped not only their writing practices but also the sphere of literacy itself. For these authors, a single photograph or a photograph as illustration is never an endpoint; their authorial practices continually transform and animate the frozen moment. But just as authors used images to shape the reception of their work and selves, Russian photographers—including Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky and Alexander Rodchenko—used text to shape the reception of their visual work. From the diary to print, the literary word imbues that photographic moment with a personal life story, and frames and reframes it in the writing of history. In this primer on photographic literacy, Reischl argues for the central place that photography has played in the formation of the Russian literary imagination over the course of roughly seventy years. From image to text and back again, she traces the visual consciousness of modern Russian literature as captured through the lens of the Russian author-photographer.