Books in the Crosscurrents: Russia's Literature in Context series

This collection examines the letters of Anton Chekhov, which have received relatively little scholarly attention. The contributors approach the letters from a variety of angles-biography, psychology, literary criticism, poetics, and history-to characterize Chekhov's key epistolary concerns and to examine their role in his life.

This study examines the treatment of physical pain in a selection of classical Greek plays and nineteenth-century Russian novels. The author highlights parallels between these Greek and Russian texts and analyzes how they employ pain to investigate the legitimacy of the state and the justice of the world order.

This study explores symbolist aesthetics as methods for fluid transmutation from the cognitive to the spiritual. Kostetskaya examines the links between symbolist poetry, paintings, and cinema and their evoked sensory-emotional imagery in the context of iconicity and conceptual blending.

This panoramic history of the Russian intelligentsia provides a uniquely cross-disciplinary look at the language of the Russian Revolution from its origins through fruition in early Soviet society. Harrison examines storms, floods, and harvest metaphors in selected works of fiction and analyzes the use of language as a weapon of class war.

This book examines the Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, and its role in Russian culture. The contributors examine the interplay of research and imagination in biographical narratives, the changing perceptions of what constitutes literary greatness, and the subversive possibilities of biography during eras of censorship.

This study analyzes the biblical Tower of Babel story, a cautionary tale that accounts for the diversity of languages and peoples. The author pursues its linking of language, architecture, and society as well as its relevance in art and literature over centuries. To come to terms with a perceived disorder in the realm of language, alternative explanations and projects for remediation abound. The disorder and diversity themselves find expression in art, literature, and philosophical reflection and caused the emergence of a historical linguistics. The ambition of the builderswith its social and organizational premisereemerges in both political and material form as cities, states, and monumental constructions. Utopian aspirations and linguistic claims permeate both revolutionary notions of universality and the romantic essentialism of the nation state. These in turn provoke dystopian critique in literature and film. As Martin Meisel reveals in this study, the wrestle with language in its recalcitrant instability and imperfect social function enters into dialogue with the celebration of its diversity, elasticity, and creativity.

Russia's chief poet Alexander Pushkin defines envy as "wingless desire" in his short play "Mozart and Salieri" (1830). Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia examines how the Mozart and Salieri literary archetypes swap roles and how "envier" becomes "envied" in Russian Modernist prose during the New Economic Policy of 1921-1928.