Bieganski: The Brute Polack Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture.
by Danusha Goska
ISBN 978-1-936235-15-5
344 pp. cloth
$69.00
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Publication Date: July, 2010

 In this controversial study, Goska exposes one stereotype of Poles and other Eastern Europeans. In the "Bieganski" stereotype, Poles exhibit the qualities of animals. They are strong, stupid, violent, fertile, anarchic, dirty, and especially hateful in a way that more evolved humans are not. Their special hatefulness is epitomized by their Polish anti-Semitism. "Bieganski" discovers this stereotype in the mainstream press, scholarship, film, in Jews' self-definition, and in responses to the Holocaust. Bieganski's twin is Shylock, the stereotype of the crafty, physically inadequate, moneyed Jew. The final chapters of the book are devoted to interviews with American Jews. These reveal that Bieganski – and Shylock – are both alive and well among those who have little knowledge of Poles or Poland.

Reviews:

"Stereotypes of Poles have been commonplace in Western society.

Danusha V. Goska presents a comprehensive overview of such images in a balanced fashion. She offers no apologetic for genuine instance of Polish anti-Semitism. But she also exposes those rooted in outright prejudice with no foundation in fact. An important contribution to improved Polish-Jewish understanding."
-- John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, Ph.D., professor of Social Ethics, Director, Catholic-Jewish Studies Program Catholic Theological Union Chicago

"A powerful, provocative, ultimately profound work of scholarship regarding the stereotypification of Poles and its implications not only for Polish-Jewish relations in the Old World and the New, but also for anyone wishing to fathom the interworkings of class and ethnicity in an America that has all too often fallen short of its promise."
-- James P. Leary, folklorist, University of Wisconsin

“In this most important work, Dr. Goska's style incorporates those necessary ingredients that justify writing as an art form: her grammar is impeccable, even while the pathways of her sentences can be unpredictable. Her imagery is robust, but yet it never gets in the way of the underlying premises of her arguments. Moreover, her thinking is crisp, and her knowledge of this very sensitive topic is thoroughly evident. Indeed, the reader cannot help but be persuaded by the logical unfolding of the positions she brings to this necessary work.

Above all, she establishes that all-important trust in her readers: that while she may jostle their previously-held constructs, she will also protect them on a literary journey that could be harrowing and dangerous in lesser hands.”
-- Dr. Michael Herzbrun, Rabbi Temple Emanu-El, Rochester, NY

"Bieganski is a truly important book because it challenges and demolishes the widely held belief that Poles are nothing more than ignorant and brutish anti-Semites who played a central role in causing the Holocaust. Goska does a first-rate job of describing how Jews and Poles really interacted with each other over their rich history together. Let's hope that this book is widely read and helps change the conventional wisdom about Polish-Jewish relations."

--John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago

"Danusha Goska's daring and far-reaching study examines the sources and prevalence of stereotyped images of Poles as brutal, subhuman creatures. Drawing on her extensive research in history, popular culture, and folklore, and also on interviews of Poles and Jews in America today, interviews of both stereotypers and victims of stereotyping, she teaches us all something profound about how the image of the Polak originated and why it continues to flourish."
--John Guzlowski, author of "The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald" and "Lightening and Ashes"

Series: Jews of Poland

Ivan Konevskoi: "Wise Child" of Russian Symbolism.
by Joan Delaney Grossman
ISBN 978-1-934843-89-5
200 pp. cloth
$45.00
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Publication Date: February, 2010

Ivan Konevskoi: “Wise Child” of Russian Symbolism is the first study in any language of Ivan Konevskoi – poet, thinker, mystic – for many decades the “lost genius” of Russian modernism. A fresh and compelling figure, Konevskoi plunged deeply into currents of modern mystical thought and art in the 1890s. A passionate searcher for immortality, he developed his own version of pantheism meant to guard his unique persona from dissolution in the All-One. The poetry of Tiutchev, Vladimir Solov’ev and Rossetti, William James’s psychology, paintings of Pre-Raphaelites and Arnold Boecklin, Old Russian historical myth, the Finnish Kalevala: all engaged him during his brief life. His worldview grew more audacious, his confidence in the magical power of the word grew more assured. Drowning in 1901 at 23, Konevskoi left a legacy unfinished, rich, and intriguing.

Reviews:
“Ivan Konevskoi (1877-1901) strove throughout his tragically brief earthly life to "abolish death" by penetrating the mystic core of the universe. His earthly survival has now been notably enhanced by Joan Grossman's splendid book, a comprehensive account of the poet's life, thought, and accomplishments. Deeply sympathetic but always clear-eyed and sensible, Grossman's narrative is exhaustively researched but never pedantic, engagingly written and rich in illuminations derived from the author's lifelong study of Russian poetry, especially of the Symbolist era.”
        -- Hugh McLean, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

“Joan Grossman’s spiritual biography of “poet-mystic-thinker” Ivan Konevskoi (Oreus) fills a large gap in the scholarship on early Russian modernism. Although never entirely forgotten, Konevskoi was largely ignored by scholars in both Russia and in the West, before the appearance of this substantial monograph. With the superb knowledge of her subject-matter that years of painstaking and engaged research have given her, Grossman guides us through the poet’s short, but intense, quest for immortality through his own brand of pantheism. As Grossman shows, Konevskoi’s spiritual journey, which ended prematurely by accidental drowning, has many intriguing stops along the way. Grossman makes this journey entertaining and informative. This is a major work by a distinguished scholar, which is bound to stimulate further research of this elusive poet.”
-- Irene Masing-Delic, Ohio State University and author of Exotic Moscow through         Western Eyes

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

Mandelstam.
by Oleg Lekmanov, translated by Tatiana Retivov
ISBN 978-1-934843-28-4
200 pp. cloth
$32.00
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Publication Date: January, 2010

Now available for the first time in English, Oleg Lekmanov’s critically acclaimed Mandelstam presents the maverick Russian poet’s life and work to a wider audience and includes the most reliable details of the poet’s life which were recently found and released from the KGB archives. Through his engaging narrative, Lekmanov carries the reader through Mandelstam’s early life and education in pre-revolutionary Petersburg and at the Sorbonne in Paris and in Heidelberg and his return to revolutionary Russia. Bold and fearless, he was quoted saying: “Only in Russia do they respect poetry. They even kill you for it.” Osip Mandelstam compared a writer to a parrot, saying that once his owner tires of him, he will cover his cage with black cloth, which becomes for literature a surrogate of night. In 1938, Mandelstam was arrested and six months later became a statistic:  over 500,000 political prisoners were sent to the Gulags in 1938; between 1931 and 1940, over 300,000 prisoners died in the Gulags - one of them was the poet Osip Mandelstam. This is the tragic story of his life pre-empted by the black cloth of Stalinism.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

The Twentieth Century Russian Short Story: A Critical Companion.
by Lyudmila Parts
ISBN 978-1-934843-44-4
300 pp. cloth
$45.00
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Publication Date: December, 2009

The 20th Century Russian Short Story: A Critical Companion is a collection of the most informative critical articles on some of the best twentieth-century Russian short stories from Chekhov and Bunin to Tolstaya and Pelevin. While each article focuses on a particular short story, collectively they elucidate the developments in each author’s oeuvre and in the subjects, structure, and themes of the twentieth-century Russian short story. American, European and Russian scholars discuss the recurrent themes of language’s power and limits, of childhood and old age, of art and sexuality, and of cultural, individual and artistic memory. The book opens with a discussion of the short story genre and its socio-cultural function. This book will be of value to all scholars of Russian literature, the Short Story, and Genre Theory.

Series: Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century

Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, 1880s to the Present.
by Henrietta Mondry
ISBN 978-1-934843-39-0
270 pp. cloth
$58.00
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Publication Date: November, 2009

This book explores the construction of the Jew’s physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cultural productions underwent a significant change, as these cultural practices recast the Jew not only as an archetypal “exotic” and religious or class Other (as in Romanticism and realist writing), but as a biological Other whose acts, deeds, and thoughts were determined by racial differences. This Jew allegedly had physical and psychological characteristics that were genetically determined and that could not be changed by education, acculturation, conversion to Christianity, or change of social status. This stereotype has become a stable archetype that continues to operate in contemporary Russian society and culture.

Series: Borderlines: Russian and East European - Jewish Studies

The Superstitious Muse: Mythopoetic Thinking and Russian Literature.
by David Bethea
ISBN 978-1-934843-17-8
320 pp. cloth
$80.00
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Publication Date: November, 2009

For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the “mythopoetic thinking” that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of “erasure” and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their art is increasingly moot. The lichnost’ (personhood, psychic totality) of the given writer is all-important, argues Bethea, as it is that which combines the specifically biographical and the capaciously mythical in verbal units that speak simultaneously to different planes of being. Pushkin’s Evgeny can be one incarnation of the poet himself and an everyman rising up to challenge Peter’s new world order; Brodsky can be, all at once, Dante and Mandelstam and himself, the exile paying an Orphic visit to Florence (and, by ghostly association, Leningrad). It is this sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers’ lives, that is Bethea’s primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea’s most memorable previously published essays along with new studies prepared for this occasion.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts.
by Marcus Levitt
ISBN 978-1-934843-68-0
440 pp. cloth
$59.00
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Publication Date: October, 2009

Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts brings together twenty essays by Marcus C. Levitt, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century Russian literature.  The essays address a spectrum of works and issues that shaped the development of modern Russian literature, from authorship and philosophy to gender and religion in Russian Enlightenment culture.  The first part of the collection explores the career and works of Alexander Sumarokov, who played a formative role in literary life of his day.  In the essays of the second part Levitt argues that the Enlightenment’s privileging of vision played an especially important role in eighteenth-century Russian self-image, and that its “occularcentrism” was profoundly shaped by Orthodox religious views. Early Modern Russian Letters offers a series of original and provocative explorations of a vital but little studied period.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

A Reader's Guide to Nabokov's "Lolita".
by Julian Connolly
ISBN 978-1-934843-65-9
208 pp. cloth
$40.00
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Publication Date: September, 2009

One of the most fascinating and controversial novels of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is renowned for its innovative style and notorious for its subject matter and influence on popular culture.  A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s “Lolita” guides readers through the intricacies of Nabokov’s work and helps them achieve a better understanding of his rich artistic design.  The book opens with a detailed chronology of Nabokov’s life and literary career. Chapters include an analysis of the novel, a discussion of its precursors in Nabokov’s work and in world literature, an essay on the character of Dolly Haze (Humbert’s “Lolita”), and a commentary on the critical and cultural afterlife of the novel.  The volume concludes with an annotated bibliography of selected critical reading.  The guide should prove illuminating both for first-time readers of Lolita and for experienced re-readers of Nabokov’s text.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia.
by Viktor Zhivov
ISBN 978-1-934843-12-3
524 pp. cloth
$78.00
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Publication Date: June, 2009

Victor Zhivov's Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia is one of the most important studies ever published on eighteenth-century Russia. Historians and students of Russian culture agree that the creation of a Russian literary language was key to the formation of a modern secular culture, and Language and Culture traces the growth of a vernacular language from the "hybrid Slavonic" of the late seventeenth century through the debates between "archaists and innovators" of the early nineteenth century. Zhivov's study is an essential work on the genesis of modern Russian culture; the aim of this translation is to make it available to historians and students of Russian culture.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit.
by Thomas Seifrid
ISBN 978-1-934843-08-6
200 pp. cloth
$40.00
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Publication Date: April, 2009

Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, Vol. II.
by Valentina Polukhina
ISBN 978-1-934843-16-1
604 pp. cloth
$70.00
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Publication Date: November, 2008



The new volume of interviews draws on eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky’s friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets: John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others.


This collection of 40 interviews illuminates an intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene. Continuing the discussion begun in Vol. 1, this series of interviews contains important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. The interviews are published together with many unique photographs from the private archives of the author and the interviewees.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History