The European Nabokov Web, Classicism and T.S. Eliot: A Textual Interpretation of Pale Fire.
by Robin Davies
ISBN 978-1-936235-65-0
235 pp. cloth
$69.00
Order

Publication Date: June, 2011

Robin Davies here demonstrates that Nabokov’s Pale Fire has a classical unity and represents a direct attack on T.S. Eliot’s philosophical position, particularly as given in The Waste Land and as represented by Eliot’s later tendency for conservatism in literature, politics and religion. After Nabokov was forced into exile from Germany and then France in the 1930s with his young son and Jewish wife, Eliot’s passivism must have seemed to him the very antithesis of survival. The enigmatic Pale Fire and its surface triviality suggested that there could be self-consistent logic within the obvious commentary of Charles Kinbote and John Shade’s poem. Davies places this work in its vast European context, forming a bridge between Russian and European literature which will be appreciated by scholars of both.

Series: Out of the Series

“I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky.
by Marat Grinberg
ISBN 978-1934843-73-4
400 pp. cloth
$65.00
Order

Publication Date: January, 2011

Boris Slutsky (1919-1986) is a major original figure of Russian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century whose oeuvre has remained unexplored and unstudied.  The first scholarly study of the poet, Marat Grinberg’s book substantially fills this critical lacuna in the current comprehension of Russian and Soviet literatures.  Grinberg argues that Slutsky’s body of work amounts to a Holy Writ of his times, which daringly fuses biblical prooftexts and stylistics with the language of late Russian Modernism and Soviet newspeak. The book is directed toward readers of Russian poetry and pan-Jewish poetic traditions, scholars of Soviet culture and history, and the burgeoning field of Russian Jewish studies.  Finally, it contributes to the general field of poetics and Modernism.

Reviews:

“Boris Slutsky, according to this brilliant book, accomplished the seemingly impossible: a poet of Soviet times, he reforged the totality of Russian literary culture, from Church Slavonic to Pushkin to Khlebnikov and beyond, within the crucible of Jewish self-understanding.

Marat Grinberg, author of this impressive study, has also accomplished the seemingly impossible. He demonstrates how this supremely Russian poet can and must be read in his totality: 'from right to left,' from beginning to end, and from his desk drawer to Red Square.”  
—David G. Roskies, Sol and Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary. Director, Center for Yiddish Studies, Ben Gurion University of the Negev


“In this erudite and insightful book, Marat Grinberg rescues a great poet from a numbing set of mid-century cliches. No longer a 'war poet,' or 'Soviet diarist,' or sometime Jew, Boris Slutsky emerges as he was in fact—a sometimes playful, sometimes anguished heir to Russian modernism who read Jewish catastrophe through Jewish texts.”
—Alice Nakhimovsky, Professor of Russian and Jewish Studies, Colgate University

Series: Borderlines: Russian and East European - Jewish Studies

Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak.
by Frederick T. Griffiths, Stanley J. Rabinowitz
ISBN 978-1-936235-53-7
250 pp. cloth
$69.00
Order

Publication Date: April, 2011

The authors read some of the classics in the Russian novelistic tradition against a critique of the Lukacs-Bakhtin view of epic, all the while demonstrating the modernity of epic as a literary mode and arguing how some key Russian novels challenge or outgrow their generic form to re-imagine or re-invent a new, monumental one.  The chapters on Gogol's Dead Souls, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, have major implications for understanding the sweep of Russian literature as a whole, while the final chapter on Stalinist epic, which includes fresh insights on Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam, considers other literary genres--the memoir and the narrative poem--against the background of the epic tradition.  Teachers, graduate students, undergraduates as well as serious non-academic critics will profit from the original arguments which provide suggestions for re-reading Russian prose generally.

Review:
“Griffiths and Rabinowitz reveal the genre's liveliness, fluidity, and seemingly limitless ability to assert itself in modern letters. Nearly every sentence rewards, and will provoke serious readers to pause and think. The impressive erudition and critical imagination which Griffiths/Rabinowitz combine make one hope that this ancient/modern pair of critical bogatyri will sally forth again.”
—John John M. Kopper, Dartmouth College

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

Jacob's Ladder: Kabbalistic Allegory in Russian Literature.
by Marina Aptekman
ISBN 978-1-934843-38-3
250 pp. cloth
$70.00
Order

Publication Date: June, 2011

Focusing primarily on the close study of literary works presented in the broad cultural and historical context, Jacob’s Ladder discusses the reflection of kabbalistic allegory in Russian literature and provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of the perception of Kabbalah in Russian consciousness. Aptekman investigates the questions of when, how and why Kabbalah has been used in Russian literary texts from Pre-Romanticism to Modernism and what particular role it played in the larger context of the Russian literary tradition. The correct understanding of this liaison helps the reader to clarify many enigmatic images in Russian literary works of the last two centuries and to understand the roots of a particular cultural falsification that played an important role in the anti-Semitic mythology of the twentieth century.

Reviews:

"Marina Aptekman makes skillful use of rich and diverse source materials, some new and others interpreted in an original and innovative way. This is an important and thought-provoking contribution to the field of Russian-Jewish cultural relations."
—Mikhail Krutikov, associate professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Michigan

“This book is a fascinating study of a largely unexplored subject--the role of Kabbalah in Russian literature from the mid 17th to the 20th century and the larger context in which literature developed. Focusing on images and allegories that derive, directly and indirectly, from Kabbalah, Aptekman shows how and why lt became an important element in mystical freemasonry, romanticism, and modernism. In addition, she limns the alternation between mystical and magical (or occult) interpretations of kabbalah and reveals how the occult interpretation came to be associated with black magic and, eventually, with the myth of a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy.”
—Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, professor of History, Fordham University

Series: Borderlines: Russian and East European - Jewish Studies

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
Order

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

Charms of Cynical Reason: Tricksters in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture.
by Mark Lipovetsky
ISBN 978-1-934843-45-1
250 pp. cloth
$65.00
Order

Publication Date: February, 2011

The impetus for Charms of the Cynical Reason is the phenomenal and little-explored popularity of various tricksters flourishing in official and unofficial Soviet culture, as well as in the post-soviet era. Mark Lipovetsky interprets this puzzling phenomenon through analysis of the most remarkable and fascinating literary and cinematic images of soviet and post-soviet tricksters, including such “cultural idioms” as Ostap Bender, Buratino, Vasilii Tyorkin, Shtirlitz, and others. The steadily increasing charisma of Soviet tricksters from the 1920s to the 2000s is indicative of at least two fundamental features of both the soviet and post-soviet societies. First, tricksters reflect the constant presence of irresolvable contradictions and yawning gaps within the soviet (as well as post-soviet) social universe. Secondly, these characters epitomize the realm of cynical culture thus far unrecognized in Russian studies. Soviet tricksters present survival in a cynical, contradictory and inadequate world, not as a necessity, but as a field for creativity, play, and freedom. Through an analysis of the representation of tricksters in soviet and post-soviet culture, Lipovetsky attempts to draw a virtual map of the soviet and post-soviet cynical reason: to identify its symbols, discourses, contradictions, and by these means its historical development from the 1920s to the 2000s.

Reviews:

“Mark Lipovetsky’s work makes a critical intervention in the study of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture. Recent scholarship has made great strides in overcoming the binary categories that once characterized accounts of Soviet society—in most different ways—in both the USSR and the West: official vs. unofficial, conformist vs. dissident, socialist bloc vs. the capitalist West, etc. As works in history, anthropology and sociology have begun to show, life in the Soviet Union was painted in shades of grey, admitting a huge range of economic behaviors, social interactions, and political values located “between and betwixt.” With this book, in one brilliant stroke, Lipovetsky has brought home these insights with regard to the study of Soviet literature and culture. The figure of the trickster, which Lipovetsky finds across an enormous range of important, canonical and beloved works, was at once the embodiment of socialist values and a subversive, concretizing the special forms of identity and social skills required for survival in the Soviet Union. This study shows us in a new manner what was distinctive about Soviet social and cultural history and in what ways it should be seen as a variety of the common story of modernity. Further, it explores how the cultural life of present-day Russia has inherited these structures and patterns. Lipovetsky’s erudition is vast, his critical acumen is impressive, and his writing is superbly nuanced and exciting. In short, this is a remarkable addition to scholarship.”
—Kevin Platt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of Pennsylvania, and author of History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution

“By focusing on the figure of the trickster, Mark Lipovetsky develops a new language for talking about subjectivity and ideology in Soviet and post-Soviet literature. The trickster shows just how inadequate talk of accommodation and resistance is when approaching the discourse of power in modern Russia. It turns out that the famously dualistic Russian culture has plenty of ways to go beyond “either/or,” and the trickster knows them all. Fortunately for us, Lipovetsky knows them as well.”

—Eliot Bornstein, Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at NYU, and the author of Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 and Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture

Series: Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century

All the Same the Words Don't Go Away: Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition.
by Caryl Emerson
ISBN 978-1-934843-81-9
422 pp. cloth
$75.00
Order

Publication Date: December, 2010

All the Same the Words Don't Go Away brings together twenty-five years of essays and reviews, linked loosely by three themes.   The first explores the legacy of Mikhail Bakhtin: his ideas of dialogue and carnival, and the debates ignited by each. The second delves into three "master workers" of the Russian tradition: Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. In this section, emphasis is comparative: the riddle of Pushkin's life, why "Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky," how Chekhov reads Tolstoy, why Kundera dislikes Doestoevsky and Tolstoy dislikes Shakespeare. The final section addresses the transposition of classic literary texts into other media through musical works by Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. Throughout, the fundamental heroes are Pushkin's Tatiana Larina and Boris Godunov. This volume will be of interest to comparativists and students in interdisciplinary humanities.

Reviews:

"If ever there was a writer whose words should never be allowed to go away, it is Caryl Emerson, our most precious musicoliterary bridge builder.  Having these words collected is like having a party with all your best friends."
—Richard Taruskin, University of California at Berkeley

"This collection illustrates both the astonishing breadth of Caryl Emerson’s interests, and also her ability to return again and again to the same texts from different perspectives.  There is no one writing today in the field of Russian culture more sensitive to its various voices than Emerson.  She has an unparalleled ability to listen to her authors – literary, musical, scholarly, and theoretical – and report what they are up to."
—Donna Orwin, University of Toronto

“For many years Caryl Emerson has been recognized as America's best - most versatile, profound, and energetic - scholar of Russian literary and musical culture.  Her contributions to our understanding of Russian masterpieces have ranged from utterly accurate translations, to scrupulously fair reviews, to performances, to provocative essays, to rigorously researched and argued volumes.  This volume, which should be read cover-to-cover, captures this exceptional range with sections on major Russian thinkers, writers and performers.  I can imagine no better guide to Russian culture than these unfailingly fresh, insightful, and engaging essays.”
—William Mills Todd III, Harvard University

Series: Ars Rossika

The Goalkeeper: The Nabokov Almanac.
by Yuri Leving
ISBN 978-1-936235-19-3
326 pp. cloth
$39.00
Order

Publication Date: October, 2010

The Goalkeeper is a new scholarly almanac devoted to the art of Vladimir Nabokov. Himself an ardent goalkeeper, the author of Lolita viewed soccer as more than a game: "I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret" (Speak, Memory). The inaugural collection features contributions from two dozen leading Nabokov scholars worldwide, including academic articles (Neil Cornwell, Gerard de Vries, Samuel Schuman, and others); roundtable discussions (Brian Boyd, Jeff Edmunds, Priscilla Meyer, David Rampton, Leona Toker); interviews (Dmitri Nabokov, Alvin Toffler); archival materials; the Kyoto Nabokov conference report; and book reviews (Pekka Tammi, Zoran Kuzmanovich, Galya Diment). The Nabokov Almanac, edited by Yuri Leving, is affiliated with the Nabokov Online Journal, published since 2007. View the book trailer on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LVIZ0T_1qc. 

Reviews:

"A virtual cornucopia of Nabokoviana! With its impressive diversity of contributors and stylish format, Yuri Leving’s The Goalkeeper promises to be the place to look for the latest on one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and most stimulating thinkers."
—David Bethea, Vilas Professor of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin-Madison / University of Oxford

"The Goalkeeper is a remarkable team effort. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the life and art of Vladimir Nabokov."  
—Leland de la Durantaye, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English, Harvard University

"The book that emerges is one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient’s mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the contributors."
—T.W. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology, Waindell College

Series: Out of the Series

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
Order

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

Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter.
by Oliver Smith
ISBN 978-1-936235-17-9
308 pp. cloth
$59.00
Order

Publication Date: November, 2010

While he is widely acknowledged as the most important Russian thinker of the nineteenth century, Vladimir Soloviev’s place in the landscape of world philosophy nevertheless remains uncertain. Approaching him through a single synoptic lens, this book foregrounds his unique envisioning of the interaction between humanity and the material world. By investigating the development of a single theme in his work—his idea of the "spiritualization of matter", the "task" of humanity—Smith constructs a rounded picture of Soloviev’s overall importance to an understanding of nineteenth-century thought, as well as to modern theology and philosophy. The picture that emerges is of a writer whose contribution to a Christian philosophy of matter resonates with many of the religious debates of modernity.


Reviews:

"Oliver Smith’s Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter is one of the best recent works in English about Soloviev, indeed about Russian philosophy in general. It tackles complex philosophical concepts with unusual clarity, lucidity and cohesion, exploring the evolution of Soloviev’s philosophical system, and offering detailed and nuanced analyses of the relationships of Soloviev's ideas with those of his great predecessors (Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Jewish Kabbala etc.)."
—Lazar Fleishman, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University

"This book is a welcome contribution to a growing body of literature on Russian sophiology. Weaving his narrative around Soloviev’s spiritual and intellectual biography, Oliver Smith offers a nuanced and erudite account of Soloviev’s metaphysics of all-unity. Smith successfully shows that at the core of Soloviev’s metaphysical project was a consistent integration of spiritual and material aspects of reality, epitomized in the incarnation."
—Paul Gavrilyuk, Associate Professor of Historical Theology, University of St Thomas, Saint Paul, Minnesota

"Intelligently, poignantly, and with clear sight, Smith gives us a portrait of Soloviev and his refusal, indeed, his 'inability to think the divine without the human'; I myself could formulate no better description of this important Russian religious writer, who throughout his multi-faceted career as poet, philosopher, teacher, and journalist sought ever to articulate the ways in which matter can, is, and must be spiritualized. We are all the better for Soloviev's various writings on the subject, and now for Smith's cogent analysis of them all."
—Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin - Madison

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

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
$65.00
Order

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, which 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

Series: Jews of Poland