Fifty Writers: An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories.
translated by Valentina Brougher, Mark Lipovetsky, Frank Miller, edited by Valentina Brougher, Mark Lipovetsky
ISBN 978-1-936235-22-3
800 pp. cloth
$69.00
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Publication Date: March, 2011


The largest, most comprehensive anthology of its kind, this volume brings together significant, representative stories from every decade of the 20th century. It includes the prose of officially recognized writers and dissidents, both well-known and neglected or forgotten, plus new authors from the end of the 20th century. The selections reflect the various literary trends and approaches to depicting reality in the 20th century: traditional realism, modernism, socialist realism, and post-modernism.  Taken as a whole, the stories capture every major aspect of Russian life, history and culture in the 20th century.  The rich array of themes and styles will be of tremendous interest to students and readers who want to learn about Russia through the engaging genre of the short story.

Reviews:

"I've seen many English-language anthologies of Russian literature, but this is the first one that I want to give to all my non-specialist friends, so that they can finally understand what is so wonderful about modern Russian literature."
—Eliot Bornstein, Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at NYU and the author of Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture

"This selection of mainly newly translated stories from the 20th century includes both well-known writers and new voices. It eschews traditional selections from the former category and presents startling writings from the latter. As the editors-translators put it themselves in their lucid introduction, these stories together form a 'mega-novel' about Russia of the previous century from its first revolution to post-perestroika times."
—Irene Masing-Delic, Ohio State University

Series: Cultural Syllabus

Keys to "The Gift": A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov's Novel.
by Yuri Leving
ISBN 978-1-934843-11-6
564 pp. cloth
$75.00
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Publication Date: May, 2011

Yuri Leving's Keys to “The Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov's Novel is a new systematization of the main available data on Nabokov's most complex Russian novel, The Gift (1934–1939). From notes in Nabokov's private correspondence to scholarly articles accumulated during the seventy years since the novel’s first appearance in print, the work draws from a broad spectrum of existing material in a succinct and coherent way, as well as providing innovative analyses. The first part of the monograph, "The Novel," outlines the basic properties of The Gift (plot, characters, style, and motifs) and reconstructs its internal chronology. The second part, "The Text," describes the creation of the novel and the history of its publication, public and critical reaction, challenges of the English translation, and post-Soviet reception. Along with annotations to all five chapters of The Gift, the commentary provides insight into problems of paleography, featuring unique textological analysis of the novel based on the author's study of the archival copy of the manuscript.

Reviews:

“Yuri Leving’s meticulous dissection of Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift, fully vindicates his claim for it as ‘one of the masterpieces of twentieth century modernist literature,’ fit to stand beside Joyce's Ulysses for the allusive richness of its content and the musicality of its prose. In seven richly fact-filled chapters, Leving has unearthed a wealth of historical, chronological, biographical, textological, literary critical and bibliographical material to bolster his case, and like a scrupulous archeologist, uncovers the multiple layers of Nabokov's complex creation to illustrate and illuminate its artistic essence. In its masterly marshaling of evidence, Leving’s work is unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon.”
—Michael Scammell, the author of Solzhenitsyn, A Biography (1984) and Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (2010), the translator of The Gift into English

“Prof. Yuri Leving’s book on Nabokov’s magisterial The Gift is a masterpiece in itself, the last – and definitive – word on the subject.”
—Alexander Theroux, the author of Darconville’s Cat (1980) and Laura Warholic (2007), the literary critic of The Wall Street Journal

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

A "Labyrinth of Linkages" in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
by Gary Browning
ISBN 978-1-936235-18-6
132 pp. cloth
$39.00
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Publication Date: August, 2010

The renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy created a realistic masterpiece in Anna Karenina (1878).  In the same work, moreover, he utilized allegory and symbol to an extent and at a level of sophistication unknown in his other works.  In Browning’s study, the author identifies and analyzes previously unnoticed or only briefly mentioned “linkages and keystones” found in two highly developed clusters of symbols, arising from Anna’s momentous train ride and peasant nightmares, and of allegories, rooted in Vronsky’s disastrous steeplechase.  Within this labyrinth of symbol, allegory and structural patterning lies embedded much of the novel’s most significant meaning.  This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Russian literature, Tolstoy, symbol, allegory, structuralism, and moral criticism. 

Reviews:

 "Recent scholarship has by and large taken Tolstoy’s reference to the "labyrinth of linkages" in Anna Karenina to indicate the dense and complicated network of interrelated an mutually illuminating images that create pathways to explicating the novel's many possible meanings. However, a labyrinth in the classical sense in unicursal: one sinuous route leads from the outside into the center. The hermeneutic of Gary L. Browning's book wore closely aligns with this second conception."
—Julie W. de Sherbinin, Colby College published in The Russian Review



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
400 pp. cloth
$45.00
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Publication Date: December, 2009

The Twentieth 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

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 renown for its innovative style and notorious for its subject matter and influence on popular culture.  A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s “Lolita” carries 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 classic work.

Review:

"The importance of this book lies in the way it succinctly summarizes critical viewpoints yet provides a fresh and accessible interpretation of the novel… [Connolly] never claims to give a definitive reading of the book, only to try to help readers "grasp the full complexity and sweep of Nabokov's unique creation" (p.1), which he admirably achieves." 
—Jason Merrill, Michigan State University, published in the Russian Review

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
204 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. I.
by Valentina Polukhina
ISBN 978-1-934843-15-4
360 pp. cloth
$60.00
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Publication Date: November, 2008


Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Volume 1) offers a fascinating record of conversations with poets of various nationalities about Joseph Brodsky: Czeslaw Milosz, Roy Fisher, Lev Loseff, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tomas Venclova, Viktor Krivulin, Alexander Kushner, and Elena Shvarts. In comparison with the first edition of this volume published in 1992 this new second edition is enlarged with three new interviews and a series of previously unpublished unique photographs from the personal archives of the author and the interviewees.


The collection combines biographical details with a new and authoritative interpretation of the poetics, style, and ideas of one of the most influential poets to emerge in post-Stalinist Russia. As a poet, essayist, and playwright, Brodsky is widely known and read in the English-speaking world. This book is a superb guide to further study of Brodsky's work both for specialist scholars and general readers who are intoxicated by poetry.



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


In the new second volume of Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, the collection of interviews features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky’s friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including 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 the first volume, 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

The Marsh of Gold. Pasternak’s Writings on Inspiration and Creation.
translated by Angela Livingstone, edited by Angela Livingstone
ISBN 978-1-934843-23-9
330 pp. cloth
$50.00
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Publication Date: September, 2008

Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process, and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether, are presented here in his own words (in translation) and are discussed in the extensive commentaries and introduction. The texts range from 1910 to 1946 and are between two and ninety pages long. There are commentaries on all the texts, as well as a final essay on Pasternak’s famous novel, Doctor Zhivago, which is looked at here in the light of what it says on art and inspiration.
Although universally acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Pasternak is not yet sufficiently recognized as the highly original and important thinker that he also was. All his life he thought and wrote about the nature and significance of the experience of inspiration, though avoiding the word “inspiration” where possible as his own views were not the conventional ones. The author’s purpose is (a) to make this philosophical aspect of his work better known, and (b) to communicate to readers who cannot read Russian the pleasure and interest of an “inspired” life as Pasternak experienced it.

Review:

"Lucid and full commentaries are interspersed between the pieces, making this an indispensable volume for any student of Pasternak or early twentieth-century Russia." 
—Sasha Dugdale, Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 2009

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

In Quest of Tolstoy.
by Hugh McLean
ISBN 978-1-934843-02-4
256 pp. cloth
$75.00
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Publication Date: March, 2008

Lev Tolstoy has held the attention of mankind for well over a century. A supremely talented artist, whose novels and short stories continue to entrance readers all over the world, he was at the same time a fearless moral philosopher who explored and challenged the fundamental bases of human society—political, economic, legal, and cultural. Hugh McLean, Professor Emeritus of Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying and writing about Tolstoy for many years. In these essays he investigates some of the numerous puzzles and paradoxes in the Tolstoyan heritage, engaging both with Tolstoy the artist, author of those incomparable novels, and Tolstoy the thinker, who, from his impregnable outpost at Yasnaya Polyana, questioned the received ideas and beliefs of the whole civilized world. In two concluding essays, "Tolstoy beyond Tolstoy," McLean deals with the impact of Tolstoy on such diverse figures as Ernest Hemingway and Isaiah Berlin.

Reviews:

"Reading this collection convinces me that Professor McLean is the most modest, appreciative, and penetrating critic of Tolstoy I’ve ever read."
—Bob Blaisdell, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York, reviewed in the Tolstoy Studies Journal

"The volume offers an invaluable companion both for readers of Tolstoy and for long-time fans of McLean’s meticulous and thought provoking work... Through his masterful command of Tolstoy’s writings, McLean seems to lead the reader right into Tolstoy’s mind."
—Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis University

“The volume is an invaluable companion both for readers of Tolstoy and for long-time fans of McLean’s meticulous and thought-provoking work... Through his masterful command of Tolstoy’s writings, McLean seems to lead the reader right into Tolstoy’s mind.”
—Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis University

"…this book is an important contribution to Tolstoy studies and will be surely of interest not only to specialists in Tolstoy or Russian literature and culture but to the general reader as well, largely thanks to its accessible, unpretentious and engaging style… In addition to its scholarly, informative, and pragmatic value, McLean’s book can be a source of genuine emotional and intellectual pleasure: one leaves it with a sense of having held an illuminating conversation with a very intelligent reader of Tolstoy and a passionate admirer of this great talent."
—Valeria Sobol, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign published in Slavic and East European Journal

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