Teaching a course in Russian and East European literature or film in a coming semester? Need a text to assign and help guide the course? Check out our selection of literature and film readers, companions to classic texts, and anthologies of poetry and prose below!
All titles featured come in affordable paperback editions accessible to students. If you’re interested in assigning any of our books for a course and would like to request a copy, click here to fill out an examination copy form.
Course Readers
The Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader: 2005-2016
Edited by Rimgaila Salys
The early years of the twenty-first century have been an exciting transitional period in Russian cinema, as the industry recovered from the crises of the late 1990s and again stepped onto the global stage. During these years four generations, from the late Soviet directors through post-Soviet and New Russian filmmakers to the Russian millennials, have worked in varying visual styles and with diverse narrative strategies, while searching for a new cinematic language. Financing and distribution models have evolved, along with conservative politics driving Ministry of Culture regulation. This reader is intended both for contemporary Russian cinema courses and for modern Russian culture courses that emphasize film.
Also by Rimgaila Salys: The Russian Cinema Reader: Volume I, 1908 to the Stalin Era and The Russian Cinema Reader: Volume II, The Thaw to the Present
A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts
Edited by Katherine Bowers, Connor Doak, and Kate Holland
The powerful, impassioned, and often frenetic prose of Fedor Dostoevskii continues to fascinate readers in the twenty-first century, even though we are far removed from Dostoevskii’s Russia. A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts aims to help students and readers navigate the writer’s fiction and his world, to better understand the cultural and sociopolitical milieu in which Dostoevskii lived and wrote. Rather than offer a single definitive view of the author, the book contains a collection of documents from Dostoevskii’s own time (excerpts from his letters, his journalism, and what his contemporaries wrote about him), as well as extracts from the major critical studies of Dostoevskii from the contemporary academy. The volume equips readers with a deeper understanding of Dostoevskii’s world and his writing, offering new paths and directions for interpreting his writing.
Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader
Edited by Anindita Banerjee
Since the dawn of the Space Age, when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite and sent the first human into the cosmos, science fiction literature and cinema from Russia has fascinated fans, critics, and scholars from around the world. Informed perspectives on the surprisingly long and incredibly rich tradition of Russian science fiction, however, are hard to come by in accessible form. This critical reader aims to provide precisely such a resource for students, scholars, and the merely curious who wish to delve deeper into landmarks of the genre, discover innumerable lesser-known gems in the process, and understand why science fiction came to play such a crucial role in Russian society, politics, technology, and culture for more than a century.
