The Pushkin Project
The Pushkin Project

Author: David Bethea

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“Bethea’s book conveys the story of an amazingly ambitious attempt to preserve the humanities while also saving the future of disadvantaged high school students in Chicago. … Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred review) The Pushkin Project tells the story of how a Russian studies professor changes course late in his career by reeducating himself in evolutionary thought and founding a summer institute that partners with inner-city high schools to implement a new set of learning strategies for underserved youth. These “cognitive cross-training” strategies involve introducing students from Hispanic and Black neighborhoods in the west and south sides of Chicago to the Russian culture and language, with an emphasis on poet, playwright, and novelist Alexander Pushkin. Through the lens of modern evolutionary thought, students adopt not only a new and different language and culture, but also a different sort of literary hero, one whose African heritage within the majority culture speaks to them directly. This inspiring and compelling story provides fascinating insights into Russia's national poet, brings the sciences and humanities together, and provides new directions in teaching young people from historically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Taboo Pushkin
Taboo Pushkin

Author: Alyssa Dinega Gillespie

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-07-24

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 0299287033

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since his death in 1837, Alexander Pushkin—often called the “father of Russian literature”—has become a timeless embodiment of Russian national identity, adopted for diverse ideological purposes and reinvented anew as a cultural icon in each historical era (tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet). His elevation to mythic status, however, has led to the celebration of some of his writings and the shunning of others. Throughout the history of Pushkin studies, certain topics, texts, and interpretations have remained officially off-limits in Russia—taboos as prevalent in today’s Russia as ever before. The essays in this bold and authoritative volume use new approaches, overlooked archival materials, and fresh interpretations to investigate aspects of Pushkin’s biography and artistic legacy that have previously been suppressed or neglected. Taken together, the contributors strive to create a more fully realized Pushkin and demonstrate how potent a challenge the unofficial, taboo, alternative Pushkin has proven to be across the centuries for the Russian literary and political establishments.

The Russian Canvas
The Russian Canvas

Author: Rosalind Polly Blakesley

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300184372

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Russian Canvas charts the remarkable rise of Russian painting in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the nature of its relationship with other European schools. Starting with the foundation of the Imperial Academy of the Arts in 1757 and culminating with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, it details the professionalization and wide-ranging activities of painters against a backdrop of dramatic social and political change. The Imperial Academy formalized artistic training but later became a foil for dissent, as successive generations of painters negotiated their own positions between pan-European engagement and local and national identities. Drawing on original archival research, this groundbreaking book recontextualizes the work of major artists, revives the reputations of others, and explores the complex developments that took Russian painters from provincial anonymity to international acclaim.

The Unlikely Futurist
The Unlikely Futurist

Author: James Rann

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0299328104

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the early twentieth century, a group of writers banded together in Moscow to create purely original modes of expression. These avant-garde artists, known as the Futurists, distinguished themselves by mastering the art of the scandal and making shocking denunciations of beloved icons. With publications such as "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," they suggested that Aleksandr Pushkin, the founder of Russian literature, be tossed off the side of their "steamship of modernity." Through systematic and detailed readings of Futurist texts, James Rann offers the first book-length study of the tensions between the outspoken literary group and the great national poet. He observes how those in the movement engaged with and invented a new Pushkin, who by turns became a founding father to rebel against, a source of inspiration to draw from, a prophet foreseeing the future, and a monument to revive. Rann's analysis contributes to the understanding of both the Futurists and Pushkin's complex legacy. The Unlikely Futurist will appeal broadly to scholars of Slavic studies, especially those interested in literature and modernism.

Under the Sky of My Africa
Under the Sky of My Africa

Author: Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2006-05-30

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 0810119714

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A wide-ranging consideration of the nature and significance of Pushkin's African heritage Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia's greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin's African ancestry has played the role of a "wild card" of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology; and that the ways in which Gannibal's legacy has been included in or excluded from Pushkin's biography over the last two hundred years can serve as a shifting marker of Russia's self-definition. The first single volume in English on this rich topic, Under the Sky of My Africa addresses the wide variety of interests implicated in the question of Pushkin's blackness-race studies, politics, American studies, music, mythopoetic criticism, mainstream Pushkin studies. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological in focus, the authors-representing a broad range of disciplines and perspectives-take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin's era to the surge of racism in late Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. In sum, Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of basic material on the subject as well as a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.

Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880
Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880

Author: Marcus C. Levitt

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1501731904

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In an event acknowledged to be a watershed in modern Russian cultural history, the elite of Russian intellectual life gathered in Moscow in 1880 to celebrate the dedication of a monument to the poet Alexander Pushkin, who had died nearly half a century earlier. Private and government forces joined to celebrate a literary figure, in a country in which monuments were usually dedicated to military or political heroes. In this richly detailed narrative history of the Pushkin Celebration and the developments that led up to it, Marcus C. Levitt explores the unique role of literature in nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life and puts Russian literary criticism, and Pushkin's posthumous reputation, into fresh perspective. Drawing on Soviet archival materials not readily available in the West, Levitt describes the preparations for the monument and the unfolding of the celebration. His sustained discussions of Turgenev's role and of Dostoevsky's famous "Pushkin Speech" shed new light on what was for both a culminating moment in their careers. In Levitt's view, the Pushkin Celebration represented the articulation of liberal, post-Emancipation hopes for an independent Russian intelligentsia and culture. His analysis of the problems faced by Russian liberalism illuminates the failure of concerted efforts to secure freedom of speech in nineteenth-century Russia.

A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 1826–1836
A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 1826–1836

Author: Michael Wachtel

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-01-25

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 029928543X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Alexander Pushkin’s lyric poetry—much of it known to Russians by heart—is the cornerstone of the Russian literary tradition, yet until now there has been no detailed commentary of it in any language. Michael Wachtel’s book, designed for those who can read Russian comfortably but not natively, provides the historical, biographical, and cultural context needed to appreciate the work of Russia’s greatest poet. Each entry begins with a concise summary highlighting the key information about the poem’s origin, subtexts, and poetic form (meter, stanzaic structure, and rhyme scheme). In line-by-line fashion, Wachtel then elucidates aspects most likely to challenge non-native readers: archaic language, colloquialisms, and unusual diction or syntax. Where relevant, he addresses political, religious, and folkloric issues. Pushkin’s verse has attracted generations of brilliant interpreters. The purpose of this commentary is not to offer a new interpretation, but to give sufficient linguistic and cultural contextualization to make informed interpretation possible.

Greetings, Pushkin!
Greetings, Pushkin!

Author: Jonathan Brooks Platt

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2016-09-02

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0822981424

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1937, the Soviet Union mounted a national celebration commemorating the centenary of poet Alexander Pushkin's death. Though already a beloved national literary figure, the scale and feverish pitch of the Pushkin festival was unprecedented. Greetings, Pushkin! presents the first in-depth study of this historic event and follows its manifestations in art, literature, popular culture, education, and politics, while also examining its philosophical underpinnings. Jonathan Brooks Platt looks deeply into the motivations behind the Soviet glorification of a long-dead poet—seemingly at odds with the October revolution's radical break with the past. He views the Pushkin celebration as a conjunction of two opposing approaches to time and modernity: monumentalism and eschatology. Monumentalism—in pointing to specific moments and individuals as the origin point for cultural narratives, and eschatology—which glorifies ruptures in the chain of art or thought, and the destruction of canons. In the midst of the Great Purge, the Pushkin jubilee was a critical element in the drive toward a nationalist discourse that attempted to unify and subsume the disparate elements of the Soviet Union, supporting the move to "socialism in one country".

The Bomber Mafia
The Bomber Mafia

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0316296937

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A “truly compelling” (Good Morning America) New York Times bestseller that explores how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war—from the creator and host of the podcast Revisionist History. In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?” Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

Pushkin's Monument and Allusion
Pushkin's Monument and Allusion

Author: Sidney Eric Dement

Publisher:

Published: 2019-09-02

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1487532237

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pushkin's Monument and Allusion is the first aesthetic analysis of Russia's most famous monument to its greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin.