Author : Mary Hobson
Publisher :
Page : 660 pages
File Size : 30,10 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Drama
ISBN :
Seeks to account for the disparity between Aleksander Griboedov's Woe from Wit and his other works, by examining his plays and poems, letters and travel notes, the memoirs of his contemporaries, his literary sources and social milieu. Positive and negative influences are discussed.
Author : Yury Tynyanov
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 798 pages
File Size : 30,79 MB
Release : 2021-04-27
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0231550545
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, a novel by Yury Tynyanov, one of the leading figures of the Russian formalist school, describes the final year in the life of Alexander Griboedov, the author of the comedy Woe from Wit. As ambassador to Persia, Griboedov was murdered in 1829 by a Tehrani mob during the sacking of the Russian embassy. One of the central texts of Russian formalist literary production, the novel is a brilliant meditation on the nature of historical and poetic consciousness and of artistic creation. It is a complex and fascinating work that explores the relationships among individual memory, historical fact, and the literary imagination. The result is a hybrid text, containing elements of various genres—historical, biographical, existential, and adventure novels—and a deeply personal, almost confessional testament to the writer’s relationship to his generation and the state. Completed in 1927, almost a century after the events it depicts, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar marks the watershed between revolution and reaction. At a time when the Soviet regime was becoming increasingly restrictive of freedom of expression and conscience, Tynyanov grappled with the themes of disillusionment, betrayal, and unrealized potential. Unabashedly intellectual yet filled with intrigue and suspense, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is a great historical novel of Russian modernism.
Author : Gary Greenberg
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 359 pages
File Size : 47,87 MB
Release : 2013-05-02
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1101621109
“Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age, and the DSM-5 is his Inferno.” —Errol Morris Since its debut in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set down the “official” view on what constitutes mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5 has taken fire for encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses—and to prescribe sometimes unnecessary or harmful medications. Respected author and practicing psychotherapist Gary Greenberg embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition, and returned with an unsettling tale. Exposing the deeply flawed process behind the DSM-5’s compilation, The Book of Woe reveals how the manual turns suffering into a commodity—and made the APA its own biggest beneficiary.
Author : Alexander Griboedov
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 35,50 MB
Release : 2020-04-14
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0231548516
Alexander Griboedov’s Woe from Wit is one of the masterpieces of Russian drama. A verse comedy set in Moscow high society after the Napoleonic wars, it offers sharply drawn characters and clever repartee, mixing meticulously crafted banter and biting social critique. Its protagonist, Alexander Chatsky, is an idealistic ironist, a complex Romantic figure who would be echoed in Russian literature from Pushkin onward. Chatsky returns from three years abroad hoping to rekindle a romance with his childhood sweetheart, Sophie. In the meantime, she has fallen in love with Molchalin, her reactionary father Famusov’s scheming secretary. Chatsky speaks out against the hypocrisy of aristocratic society—and as scandal erupts, he is met with accusations of madness. Woe from Wit was written in 1823 and was an immediate sensation, but under heavy-handed tsarist censorship, it was not published in full until forty years later. Its influence is felt not just in Russian literary language but in everyday speech. It is the source of a remarkable number of frequently quoted aphorisms and turns of phrase, comparable to Shakespeare’s influence on English. Yet owing to its complex rhyme scheme and verse structure, the play has frequently been considered almost untranslatable. Betsy Hulick’s translation brings Griboedov’s sparkling wit, spirited dialogue, and effortless crossing of registers from elevated to colloquial into a lively contemporary English.
Author : Karolina Pavlova
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 17,67 MB
Release : 2019-08-06
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0231549113
An unsung classic of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life alternates prose and poetry to offer a wry picture of Russian aristocratic society and vivid dreams of escaping its strictures. Pavlova combines rich narrative prose that details balls, tea parties, and horseback rides with poetic interludes that depict her protagonist’s inner world—and biting irony that pervades a seemingly romantic description of a young woman who has everything. A Double Life tells the story of Cecily, who is being trapped into marriage by her well-meaning mother; her best friend, Olga; and Olga’s mother, who means to clear the way for a wealthier suitor for her own daughter by marrying off Cecily first. Cecily’s privileged upbringing makes her oblivious to the havoc that is being wreaked around her. Only in the seclusion of her bedroom is her imagination freed: each day of deception is followed by a night of dreams described in soaring verse. Pavlova subtly speaks against the limitations placed on women and especially women writers, which translator Barbara Heldt highlights in a critical introduction. Among the greatest works of literature by a Russian woman writer, A Double Life is worthy of a central place in the Russian canon.
Author : Vladimir Propp
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 20,1 MB
Release : 2009-11-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1442697202
An extensive investigation of the forms and functions of the comic, this lively and engaging English critical edition will be welcomed by those interested in laughter, comedy, folklore, Russian literature, and specific authors such as Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov, Rabelais, Molière, and Shakespeare. The direct, humorous, and provocative style of this work, which tackles the subject of humour with a vast array of vivid examples encountered on every page, will certainly appeal to the contemporary reader. Vladimir Propp takes various forms of laughter in literature and real life and addresses questions such as the comic of similarity, the comic of difference, parody, duping, incongruity, lying, ritual laughter, and carnival laughter. The author of the widely acclaimed Morphology of the Folktale has written an original, comprehensive, and exciting study on how humour works, and on everything you wanted to know about the genre, in a clear, approachable, and insightful manner.
Author : John Stark Bellamy, II
Publisher : Gray & Company, Publishers
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 28,93 MB
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 1886228035
The foulest crimes and worst in Cleveland history are recounted in these 15 incredible-but-true tales. Each no-holds-barred account into one of this city's most notorious moments, from the 1916 waterworks collapse to the Cleveland Clinic fire to the sensational Sam Sheppard murder trial. These gripping narratives deliver high drama and dark comedy, heroes and villains, obsession, courage, treachery, deceit, fear, and guilt -- all from the streets of Cleveland.
Author : Edward St. Aubyn
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 36,6 MB
Release : 2021-06-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0374717478
Double Blind follows three close friends and their circle through a year of extraordinary transformation. Set inLondon, Cap d'Antibes, Big Sur, and a rewilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is about the headlong pursuit of knowledge—for the purposes of pleasure, revelation, money, sanity, or survival—and the consequences of fleeing from what we know about others and ourselves. When Olivia meets a new lover just as she is welcoming her best friend, Lucy, back from New York, her dedicated academic life expands precipitously. Her connection to Francis, a committed naturalist living off the grid, is immediate and startling. Eager to involve Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two—but Lucy has received shocking news of her own that binds the trio unusually close. Over the months that follow, Lucy’s boss, Hunter, Olivia’s psychoanalyst parents, and a young man named Sebastian are pulled into the friends’ orbit, and not one of them will emerge unchanged. Expansive, playful, and compassionate, Edward St. Aubyn's Double Blind investigates themes of inheritance, determinism, freedom, consciousness, and the stories we tell about ourselves. It is as compelling about ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics, and neuroscience as it is about love, fear, and courage. Most of all, it is a perfect expression of the interconnections it sets out to examine, and a moving evocation of an imagined world that is deeply intelligent, often tender, curious, and very much alive.
Author : Konstantin Stanislavsky
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 34,47 MB
Release : 1989
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780878309818
This third volume examines the development of a character from the viewpoint of three widely contrasting plays.
Author : Jonathan Evison
Publisher : Algonquin Books
Page : 498 pages
File Size : 22,27 MB
Release : 2011-01-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1565129520
A novel that is part historical and part modern contracts the lofty goals of the pioneers that settled a peninsula in Washington State with the trivial pursuits of its present-day inhabitants. By the author of All About Lulu.
