Russian & Former Soviet Union
- Alexander A. Potebnja's Psycholinguistic Theory of Literature
- John Fizer
- The work of Potebnja, a leading Ukrainian linguist of the nineteenth century, has significantly influenced modern literary criticism, particularly Russian formalism and structuralism. Yet despite his remarkable achievements in linguistics and literary theory, Potebnja's work was officially renounced in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and in the West he remains virtually unknown. In his study, John Fizer carefully reconstructs Potebnja's theory of literature from the psycholinguistic formulations found in his works on language, mythology, and folklore.
- Hardcover 1988
- An Orthodox Pomjanyk of the Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries
- Edited by Moshe Altbauer
- Ihor Sevcenko, With the Collaboration of
- Bohdan Struminsky, With the Collaboration of
- This is a publication of a diptych in which names of the dead and living Orthodox faithful with members of their families (including tsars, princes, patriarchs of Muscovy, and Ukrainian hetmans) were entered by emissaries of St. Catherine's Monastery to Muscovy, the Ukrainian Hetmanate, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Crimea, and the Ottoman Empire from the 1630s to the 1730s in exchange for alms for the monastery and the prayers of its monks.
- Hardcover 1990
- Art in the Light of Conscience
- Marina Tsvetaeva
- Translated and with an Introduction by Angela Livingstone
- In the Soviet Union, as in the West, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-4941) is acknowledged to be one of the great Russian poets of the century, along with Mandelstam, Pasternak and Akhmatova. Overnight sensation and oft-times pariah, Tsvetaeva was a poet of extraordinary intensity whose work continues to be discovered by new readers. Yet, while she is considered to be one of the major influences on modern Soviet poetry, few know of her consummate gifts as a writer of prose. These select essays, most of which have never been available in translation before, display the dazzlingly original prose style and the powerful, dialogic voice of a poet who would like to make art’s mystery accessible without diminishing it.
- Hardcover 1992
- Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790-1840
- Andreas Schönle
- In the decades before and during the rise of the Russian novel, a new form of prose writing took hold in Russia: travel accounts, often fictional, marked by a fully developed narrator's voice, interpretive impressions, scenic descriptions, and extended narrative. In illuminating analyses of major texts as well as lesser known but influential works, Andreas Schönle surveys the literary travelogue from its emergence in Russia to the end of the Romantic era.
- Hardcover 2000
- Boris Pasternak
- Lazar Fleishman
- Boris Pasternak has generally been regarded as an artist who was indifferent to the literary and political storms of his time. Fleishman gives the great writer's life a new perspective. He shows that Pasternak's entire literary career should be regarded as a complex and passionate response to constant changes in Russian cultural and social life.
- Hardcover 1990
- Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, Volume I, Letters and Theoretical Writings
- Velimir Khlebnikov
- Translated by Paul Schmidt
- Edited by Charlotte Douglas
- Hardcover
- Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, Volume II, Prose, Plays, and Supersagas
- Velimir Khlebnikov
- Translated by Paul Schmidt
- Edited by Ronald Vroon
- Hardcover 1989
- Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, Volume III, Selected Poems
- Velimir Khlebnikov
- Translated by Paul Schmidt
- Edited by Ronald Vroon
- Dubbed "a Columbus of new poetic continents" because of his search for a poetics as diverse as the universe itself, Velimir Khlebnikov is the creator of some of the most extraordinary poems in the Russian language. Sometimes surreal, sometimes esoteric, but always dazzlingly innovative, the 192 poems in this volume range broadly from the lyrical to the epic.
- Paperback 1998 / Hardcover 1998
- The Creation of Nikolai Gogol
- Donald Fanger
- Nikolai Gogol, Russia's greatest comic writer, is a literary enigma. His masterworks have attracted contradictory labels over the years, even as the originality of his achievement continues to defy exact explanation. Fanger's superb new book begins by considering why this should be so, and goes onto survey what Gogol created, step by step: an extraordinary body of writing, a model for the writer in Russian society, a textual identity that eclipses his scanty biography, and a kind of fiction unique in its time.
- Hardcover 1979 / Paperback
- Dostoevsky and The Idiot
- Robin Feuer Miller
- Hardcover 1981
- Edificatory Prose of Kievan Rus
- Kievan Rus
- William Veder
- Anatolij A. Turilov
- Paperback / Hardcover
- Essays on Mandel'stam
- Kiril Taranovsky
- Hardcover 1976
- Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin
- William Mills Todd, III
- Todd describes the ideology of the educated westernized gentry (obshchestvo) of the time, then charts the various possibilities for literary life: first patronage, the salons, popular literature; then the rapid emergence of an incipient literary profession. Through an examination of three brilliant fictions he explores the complicated interactions of literature and society as these writers "discovered" their own milieu and were discovered by it.
- Hardcover 1986
- Harvard Slavic Studies, Volume 5,
- Edited by Horace G. Lunt
- Albert B. Lord, Associate Editor
- Vsevolod Setchkarev, Associate Editor
- Wiktor Weintraub, Associate Editor
- Robert A. Rothstein, Associate Editor
- Hardcover 1970
- The King of Time
- Velimir Khlebnikov
- Translated by Paul Schmidt
- Edited by Charlotte Douglas
- Hardcover 1985 / Paperback 1990
- The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha
- Edward L. Keenan
- For centuries the exchange of letters between Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) and Prince Kurbskii, Muscovy's first notable defector, has been considered an authentic and important source for sixteenth-century Russian history. Keenan draws on all the tools of source study and literary criticism to demonstrate that the "Correspondence" is a forgery, and in fact was composed some decades later in the seventeenth century.
- Hardcover 1971
- Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value
- Jurij Streidter
- Hardcover 1989
- Marxism and Literary History
- John Frow
- Frow's book is a novel contribution to Marxist literary theory, proposing a reconciliation of formalism and historicism in order to establish the basis for a new literary history. Through a critique of his forerunners in Marxist theory, Frow seeks to define the strengths and the limitations of this tradition and then to extend its possibilities in a radical reworking of the concept of discourse.
- Hardcover 1986
- Mikhail Kuzmin
- John Malmstad
- Nikolay Bogomolov
- Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), Russia's first openly gay writer, stood at the epicenter of the turbulent cultural and social life of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad for over three decades. Kuzmin was also a prose writer, playwright, critic, translator, and composer who was associated with every aspect of modernism's history in Russia. This biography, the first in any language to be based on full and uncensored access to the writer's private papers, including his notorious Diary.
- Hardcover 1999
- Modernism and Revolution
- Victor Erlich
- Hardcover
- Nabokov and the Novel
- Ellen Pifer
- Pifer challenges the widely held assumption that Nabokov is a writer more interested in literary games than in living human beings. She demonstrates how Nabokov arranges the details of his fiction to explore human psychology and moral truth, and she argues her case with style.
- Hardcover 1980
- Nikolai Gogol
- Edyta M. Bojanowska
- The nineteenth-century author Nikolai Gogol occupies a key place in the Russian cultural pantheon as an ardent champion of Russian nationalism. In exploring Gogol's fluctuating nationalist commitments, this book traces the connections between the Russian and Ukrainian nationalist paradigms in his work, and situates both in the larger imperial context.
- Hardcover 2007
- Pushkin and His Friends
- John Malmstad
- In 1987 the Houghton Library observed the 150th anniversary of the death of Aleksandr Pushkin with an exhibition of materials drawn from the extraordinary Russian literature collection assembled by Bayard Kilgour. From this vast trove, curator John E. Malmstad chose books, letters, and manuscripts that illuminated Pushkin's life, career, and the world of influences and rivals that shaped Russia's most important literary voice.
- Paperback 2005
- Russian Literature Since the Revolution
- Edward J. Brown
- Every stage in the evolution of Russian literature since 1917, every major author, all the important literary organizations, groups, and movements, are sharply outlined, with a wealth of often unfamiliar detail and a notable economy of means. Critical essays on Mayakovsky, Zamyatin, Olesha, Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin, Erofeev, and many others offer sophisticated formal and thematic analyses of a very large array of literary masterpieces.
- Hardcover 1982 / Paperback
- The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha
- Oleh Lysheha
- Translated by James Brasfield
- Oleh Lysheha is considered the "poets' poet" of contemporary Ukraine. A dissident and iconoclast, he was forbidden to publish in the Soviet Union from 1972 to 1988. Since then, his reputation has steadily grown to legendary proportions. His work is informed by transcendentalism and Zen-like introspection, with meditations on the essence of the human experience and man's place in nature. The Collected Poems here include facing-page English and Ukrainian versions of selected poems and a play, "Friend Li Po. Brother Tu Fu." It represents a rare example of translations that are as beautiful as the original poetry and poems that anyone interested in the written word will appreciate.
- Paperback 1999
- Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, Volume 3, Weddings of Smailagic Meho
- Milman Parry, Collector
- Edited and translated by Albert B. Lord
- Edited and translated by David E. Bynum
- Hardcover 1974
- Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus
- Simon Franklin
- The authors included in this volume, Ilarion, Klim Smoljatic, and Kirill of Turov, are remarkable for both their personal and literary achievements. Franklin prefaces the texts with a substantial introduction that places each of the three authors in their historical context and examines the literary qualities as well as textual complexities of these outstanding works of Rus' literature.
- Hardcover 1991
- Thin Culture, High Art
- Anne Lounsbery
- In the early-nineteenth-century a perceived absence of literature in Russia and America gave rise to grandiose notions of literature's importance. This book examines how two traditions worked to refigure cultural lack, not by disputing it but by insisting on it, by representing the nation's (putative) cultural deficit as a moral and aesthetic advantage. Through a comparative study of Gogol and Hawthorne, this book examines parallels that seem particularly striking when we consider that these traditions had virtually no points of contact.
- Paperback 2007 / Hardcover 2007
- Toward a History of Ukrainian Literature
- George G. Grabowicz
- Ukrainian literature, reflecting a turbulent and often discontinuous political and social history, presents special problems to the historian of literature. In this book Grabowicz approaches these problems through a critique of the major non-Soviet position in the field, the History of Ukrainian Literature of the eminent Slavist Dmytro Čyževs'kyj.
- Paperback 1981
- The Ukranian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1900-1941)
- George Y. Shevelov
- Shevelov's book, based on extensive study of factual material, traces the development of Modern Standard Ukrainian in relation to the political, legal, and cultural conditions within each region. It examines the relation of the standard language to the underlying dialects, the ways in which the standard language was enriched, and the complex struggle for the unity of the language and sometimes for its very existence.
- Hardcover 1989