The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world, each analysing an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. It thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that came to be known as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections betweens Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period.
This volume offers modern perspectives, from a strong international team of scholars, on the perception of Anton Chekhov's works by three leading cultural figures of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov.
David Bergelson (1884–1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson's work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism.
This volume offers insight into Vladimir Nabokov as a reader and a teacher, and sheds new light on the relationship of his views on literary aesthetics to the development of his own oeuvre. The essays included focus on the lectures on European and Russian literature that Nabokov gave at a number of American universities in the years between his arrival in the United States and the publication of Lolita. Nabokov’s treatment of literary masterpieces by Austen, Cervantes, Chekhov, Dickens, Flaubert, Gogol, Kafka, Joyce, Proust and Stevenson is assessed by experts on these authors. Contributors are: Lara Delage-Toriel, Ben Dhooge, Yannicke Chupin, Roy Groen, Luc Herman, Flora Keersmaekers, Arthur Langeveld, Geert Lernout, Vivian Liska, Ilse Logie, Jürgen Pieters, Gerard de Vries.
The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world, each analysing an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. It thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that came to be known as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections betweens Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period.
Premier playwright of modern theater and trailblazer of the short story, Anton Chekhov was also a practising doctor, journalist, writer of comic sketches, philanthropist and activist. This volume provides an accessible guide to Chekhov's multifarious interests and influences, with over 30 succinct chapters covering his rich intellectual milieu and his tumultuous socio-political environment, as well as the legacy of his work in over two centuries of interdisciplinary cultures and media around the world. With a Preface by Cornel West, a chronology and Further Reading list, this collection is the essential guide to Chekhov's writing and the manifold worlds he inhabited.
This book provides the first detailed study in English of the religious philosophy of Vasilii Rozanov, one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of Russia's Silver Age. It examines his subversion of traditional Russian Orthodoxy, including his reverence for the Creation, his focus on the family, and his worship of sex. Rozanov is one of the towering figures of Russian culture, a major influence on thinkers and writers such as Bakhtin, Maiakovskii, and Mandel ́shtam, as well as many European writers. He critiqued Orthodox theology, and wrote extensively on philosophy, literature, and politics, and helped reform marriage and divorce laws. His enormous contribution to Russian thought has been largely neglected, and much of his work has been misunderstood. Ure addresses this by examining the basis of Rozanov's religious philosophy, the Creation of the Earth and the Book of Genesis.
The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity – as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges – in the arts and beyond. Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly.
Russia, once compared to a giant sphinx, is often considered in the Anglophone world an alien culture, often threatening and always enigmatic. Although recognizably European, Russian culture also has mystical features, including the idiosyncratic phenomenon of Russian irrationalism. Historically, Russian irrationalism has been viewed with caution in the West, where it is often seen as antagonistic to, and subversive of, the rational foundations of Western speculative philosophy. Some of the remarkable achievements of the Russian irrationalist approach, however, especially in the artistic sphere, have been recognized and even admired, though not sufficiently investigated. Bridging the gap between intellectual cultures, Olga Tabachnikova discusses such fundamental irrationalist themes as language and the linguistic underpinning of culture; the power of illusion in national consciousness; the changing relationship between love and morality; the cultural roots of humour, as well as the relevance of various individual writers and philosophers from Pushkin to Brodsky to the construction of Russian irrationalism.
Is there a sharp dividing line that separates Europe into 'East' and 'West'? This volume brings together prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, France, Poland, and Russia to examine the evolution of the concept of Europe in the two centuries between the French Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Inspired by the ideas of Martin Malia, the contributors take a flexible view of the 'cultural gradient'--the emergence, interaction, and reception of ideas across Europe. The essays address three dimensions of the gradient--the history of ideas, regimes and political practices, and the contemporary political and intellectual scene. In exploring the movement of ideas throughout Europe, The Cultural Gradient brings a new historical perspective to the field of European studies.
