Sergei Dovlatov and His Narrative Masks

Sergei Dovlatov and His Narrative Masks

Author: Jekaterina Young

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2009-07-17

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0810125978

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This book provides an introduction to Sergei Dovlatov (1941–1990) that is closely attentive to the details of his life and work, their place in the history of Soviet society and literature, and of émigré culture during this turbulent period. A journalist, newspaper editor, and prose writer, Dovlatov is most highly regarded for his short stories, which draw heavily on his experiences in Russia before 1979, when he was forced out of the country. During compulsory military service, before becoming a journalist, he worked briefly as a prison camp guard—an experience that gave him a unique perspective on the operations of the Soviet state. After moving to New York, Dovlatov published works (in the New Yorker and elsewhere) that earned him considerable renown in America and back in Russia. Young’s book presents a valuable critical overview of the prose of a late twentieth-century master within the context of the prevailing Russian and larger literary culture.


Gulag Fiction

Gulag Fiction

Author: Polly Jones

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-10-17

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1350250406

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This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.


Dovlatov and Surroundings

Dovlatov and Surroundings

Author: Alexander Genis

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2023-03-21

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13:

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Dovlatov and Surroundings is a literary ode by one of the most consequential late 20th-century Russian writers, Alexander Genis, to another: Sergei Dovlatov. Though the book’s focus is ostensibly the man himself, the text unfolds as a comprehensive look at the Soviet, post-Soviet, and American cultures that shaped him and which he shaped. Dovlatov and Surroundings constantly, but effortlessly shifts its focus from the intimate to the sweeping, as Genis’s reflections on his friendship with Dovlatov organically give way to recollections about diaspora life, which transition smoothly into analyses of language, culture, politics, and literature. Characterized by Genis as an obituary, this book makes plain the significance of Dovlatov to Russian literature and the nuances of the Soviet cultural heritage.


Soviet Postcolonial Studies

Soviet Postcolonial Studies

Author: Epp Annus

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1351850563

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Postcolonial studies is a well-established academic field, rich in theory, but it is based mostly on postcolonial experiences in former West European colonial empires. This book takes a different approach, considering postcolonial theory in relation to the former Soviet bloc. It both applies existing postcolonial theory to this different setting, and also uses the experiences of former Soviet bloc countries to refine and advance theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and presenting insights and material of relevance to scholars in a wide range of subjects, the book explores topics such as Soviet colonality as co-constituted with Soviet modernity, the affective structure of identity-creation in national and imperial subjects, and the way in which cultural imaginaries and everyday materialities were formative of Soviet everyday experience.


Discourses of Regulation and Resistance

Discourses of Regulation and Resistance

Author: Samantha Sherry

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2015-06-14

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0748698035

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Despite tense relations between the USSR and the West, Soviet readers were voracious consumers of foreign culture and literature. This book explores this ambivalent and contradictory attitude and employs in depth analysis of archive material to offer a comprehensive study of the censorship of translated literature in the Soviet Union.


Migrant Friendships in a Super-Diverse City

Migrant Friendships in a Super-Diverse City

Author: Darya Malyutina

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-10-01

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 3838267028

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This timely book offers an integrative and critical approach to the conceptualization of diversity of social ties in contemporary urban migrant populations. It explores the informal relationships of migrants in London and how the construction and the dynamics of their social ties function as a part of urban sociality within the super-diversity of London.Based on the results of a qualitative study of Russian-speaking migrants, it targets the four main themes of transnationalism, ethnicity, cosmopolitanization, and friendship. Acknowledging the complexity of the ways in which contemporary migrants rely on social relationships, the author argues that this complexity cannot be fully grasped by theories of transnationalism or explanations of ethnic communities alone. Instead, one can gather a closer understanding of migrant sociality when adding the analysis of informal relationships in different locations and with different subjects. This book suggests that friendship should be seen as an important concept for all research on migrant social connections.


Contributi italiani al XV Congresso internazionale degl slavisti

Contributi italiani al XV Congresso internazionale degl slavisti

Author: Marcello Garzaniti

Publisher: Firenze University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 8866554030

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Questo volume contiene i contributi italiani al XV Congresso Internazionale degli Slavisti (Minsk, 20-27 agosto 2013). Nel solco della migliore tradizione della slavistica italiana, i relatori presentano in diverse lingue un ampio ventaglio di tematiche che vanno dalla questione cirillo-metodiana alla riflessione critica su autori contemporanei. Pur nella diversità degli approcci disciplinari e metodologici, dalla paleografia all’analisi testuale, dalla comparativistica letteraria alla sociolinguistica, questi contributi mostrano che la slavistica italiana mantiene fede alle sue radici, sviluppando criticamente gli studi precedenti e aprendo nuove prospettive alla ricerca, mentre emerge una nuova generazione di studiosi. Come in passato, la slavistica italiana sta svolgendo un ruolo significativo non solo nelle relazioni culturali dell’Italia con i singoli paesi slavi, ma più complessivamente nell’orizzonte di un processo vasto e complesso di integrazione delle diverse culture europee, che va ben al di là dei confini dell’Unione Europea e in cui il mondo slavo, nella sua varietà di lingue e culture, costituisce uno dei suoi principali attori.


The Suitcase

The Suitcase

Author: Sergei Dovlatov

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 1582438838

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Sergei Dovlatov's subtle, dark–edged humor and wry observations are in full force in The Suitcase as he examines eight objects—the items he brought with him in his luggage upon his emigration from the U.S.S.R. These seemingly undistinguished possessions, stuffed into a worn–out suitcase, take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them, occasioning a brilliant series of interconnected tales: A poplin shirt evokes the bittersweet story of a courtship and marriage, while a pair of boots (of the kind only the Nomenklatura can afford) calls up the hilarious conclusion to an official banquet. Some driving gloves—remnants of Dovlatov's short–lived acting career—share space with neon–green crepe socks, reminders of a failed black–market scam. And in curious juxtaposition, the belt from a prison guard's uniform lies next to a stained jacket that once belonged to Fernand Léger. Imbued with a comic nostalgia overlaid with Dovlatov's characteristically dry wit, The Suitcase is an intensely human, delightfully ironic novel from "the finest Soviet satirist to appear in English since Vladimir Voinovich."


James Bond's Socialist Rivals

James Bond's Socialist Rivals

Author: TARIK CYRIL AMAR

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-11-19

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0190916281

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James Bond's Socialist Rivals focuses on blockbuster television series in the former Soviet bloc of the Cold War to recover a world of spy fiction entertainment that was both hugely popular and of great and deliberate political importance for the Communist regimes.