Since the nineteenth century, the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin has been a cultural myth, a figure absolutely central to Russian culture, even to "Russianness" itself. In this volume distinguished American Slavists address Pushkin's writings from a multiplicity of contemporary literary perspectives and investigate some of the most puzzling issues in the poet's life and work.
From his earliest publications onwards Pushkin has been the source of inspiration, and imitation, for other writers, as well as composers, painters and, more recently, film-makers. This book seeks to explore the different relationship his followers have sought with the ‘founding father’ of modern Russian culture. Pushkin’s Secret: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin takes a variety of approaches. Some contributors to the collection trace the way Pushkin’s works provided the template for the characters and stories which were produced in the first decades after his untimely death in 1837. Others reveal the impact the myths surrounding Pushkin’s tragic life were used (and abused) by followers, as well as governments of various hues. Yet other studies explore the very precise ways Pushkin’s successors used his texts as source material for their own works. ‘Pushkin’s Secret’: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin offers a series of fascinating insights into the impact that Alexander Pushkin has had on Russian culture over the last 200 years. Pushkin’s Secret: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin will be followed by two further volumes devoted to Pushkin within the SSLP series, Pushkin: Myth and Monument and Pushkin’s Legacy.
This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy’s broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular culture. Her work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialist impulses and rhetoric in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement. In addition to some of Nepomnyashchy’s best previously published scholarly work, this volume includes excerpts from The Politics of Tradition: Rerooting Russian Literature After Stalin, the book manuscript that Nepomnyashchy was working on in the last years of her life.
This text provides a source of citations to North American scholarships relating specifically to the area of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It indexes fields of scholarship such as the humanities, arts, technology and life sciences and all kinds of scholarship such as PhDs.
This bibliography, first published in 1957, provides citations to North American academic literature on Europe, Central Europe, the Balkans, the Baltic States and the former Soviet Union. Organised by discipline, it covers the arts, humanities, social sciences, life sciences and technology.
Literary scholars largely agree that the Romantic period altered the definition of tragedy, but they have confined their analyses to Western European authors. Maksim Hanukai introduces a new, illuminating figure to this narrative, arguing that Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin, can be understood as a tragic Romantic poet, although in a different mold than his Western counterparts. Many of Pushkin’s works move seamlessly between the closed world of traditional tragedy and the open world of Romantic tragic drama, and yet they follow neither the cathartic program prescribed by Aristotle nor the redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. Instead, the idiosyncratic and artistically mercurial Pushkin seized upon the newly unstable tragic mode to develop multiple, overlapping tragic visions. Providing new, innovative readings of such masterpieces as The Gypsies, Boris Godunov, The Little Tragedies, and The Bronze Horseman, Hanukai sheds light on an unexplored aspect of Pushkin’s work, while also challenging reigning theories about the fate of tragedy in the Romantic period.
Puskin's poetry, prose and drama frequently draw upon myths of classical antiquity, myths of modern European culture - grand narratives such as the Don Juan legend and Dante's Inferno - as well as uniquely Russian myths. The contributors to this volume explore these myths from a variety of critical viewpoints and highlight the specific ways in which Pushkin uses myth - among these his recurrent emphasis on the symbolism of monuments and statuary.
In 1833 Alexander Pushkin began to explore the topic of madness, a subject little explored in Russian literature before his time. The works he produced on the theme are three of his greatest masterpieces: the prose novella The Queen of Spades, the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, and the lyric "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind." Gary Rosenshield presents a new interpretation of Pushkin’s genius through an examination of his various representations of madness. Pushkin brilliantly explored both the destructive and creative sides of madness, a strange fusion of violence and insight. In this study, Rosenshield illustrates the surprising valorization of madness in The Queen of Spades and "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind" and analyzes The Bronze Horseman’s confrontation with the legacy of Peter the Great, a cornerstone figure of Russian history. Drawing on themes of madness in western literature, Rosenshield situates Pushkin in a greater framework with such luminaries as Shakespeare, Sophocles, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky providing an insightful and absorbing study of Russia’s greatest writer.
