Books in the Cultural Syllabus series

This remarkable study makes a critical intervention in the study of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture. It shows us in a new manner what was distinctive about Soviet social and cultural history and in what ways it should be seen as a variety of the common story of modernity. Further, it explores how the cultural life of present day Russia has inherited these structures and patterns.

Yuri Tynianov was a key figure of Russian Formalism, an intellectual movement in early 20th century Russia that also included Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson. Permanent Evolution gathers together for the first time Tynianov's seminal articles on literary theory and film, including several articles never before translated into English.

A collection of Russian short stories from the 21st century that includes works by famous writers and young talents alike, representing a diversity of generational, gender, ethnic and national identities. Taken together, these short stories display the rich and complex cultural and intellectual reality of contemporary Russia.

Russian Silver Age writers were full participants in European literary debates and movements. Today some of these poets, such as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva, are known around the world. This volume introduces Silver Age poetry with its cultural ferment, the manifestos and the philosophical, religious, and aesthetic debates, the occult references and sexual experimentation, and the emergence of women, Jews, gay and lesbian poets, and peasants as part of a brilliant and varied poetic environment. After a thorough introduction, the volume offers brief biographies of the poets and selections of their work in translation--many of them translated especially for this volume--as well as critical and fictional texts (some by the poets themselves) that help establish the context and outline the lively discourse of the era and its indelible moral and artistic aftermath.

Russian Silver Age writers were full participants in European literary debates and movements. Today some of these poets, such as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva, are known around the world. This volume introduces Silver Age poetry with its cultural ferment, the manifestos and the philosophical, religious, and aesthetic debates, the occult references and sexual experimentation, and the emergence of women, Jews, gay and lesbian poets, and peasants as part of a brilliant and varied poetic environment. After a thorough introduction, the volume offers brief biographies of the poets and selections of their work in translation--many of them translated especially for this volume--as well as critical and fictional texts (some by the poets themselves) that help establish the context and outline the lively discourse of the era and its indelible moral and artistic aftermath.

The powerful, impassioned, and often frenetic prose of Fedor Dostoevsky continues to fascinate readers in the twenty-first century. A Dostoevsky Companion aims to help students and readers navigate the writer's fiction and his world, to better understand the cultural and sociopolitical milieu in which Dostoevsky lived and wrote.

Intended to accompany undergraduate courses in the history of Russian cinema or Russian culture through film, this reader consists of excerpts from English language criticism and translations of excerpts of Russian-language criticism, as well as commissioned essays on thirty subtitled films widely taught in American and British courses on Russian film and culture.

Developed as a reader for upper division undergraduates and beginning graduates, From Symbolism to Socialist Realism offers broad variety of materials contextualizing the literary texts most frequently read in Russian literature courses at this level. These approaches range from critical-theoretical articles, cultural and historical analyses, literary manifestos and declarations of literary aesthetics, memoirs of revolutionary terrorism and arrests by the NKVD, political denunciations, and "literary vignettes" capturing the spirit of its particular time in a nutshell. The voices of this "polyphonic" reader are diverse: Briusov, Savinkov, Ivanov-Razumnik, Kollontai, Tsvetaeva, Shklovsky, Olesha, Zoshchenko, Zhdanov, Grossman, Evtushenko, and others. The range of specialists on Russian culture represented here is equally broad: Clark, Erlich, Grossman, Nilsson, Peace, Poznansky, Siniavskii, and others. Together they evoke and illuminate a complex and tragic era.

Intended to accompany undergraduate courses in the history of Russian cinema or Russian culture through film, this reader consists of excerpts from English language criticism and translations of excerpts of Russian-language criticism, as well as commissioned essays on thirty subtitled films widely taught in American and British courses on Russian film and culture.

Offers an introduction to the most important works of Russian literature of the last fifty years. Organised both chronologically and thematically, it is a structured presentation of significant cultural developments and literary works intended for wide use in undergraduate courses on Russian literature and culture.

A collection of Russian short stories from the 21st century that includes works by famous writers and young talents alike, representing a diversity of generational, gender, ethnic and national identities. The stories display a vast spectrum of subgenres, from grotesque absurdist to lyrical essays, from realistic narratives to fantastic parables.

Yuri Lotman was one of the most prominent and influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet Union. This collection provides a stand-alone primer to his intellectual legacy in both semiotics and cultural history. It includes new translations of some of his major pieces as well as works that have never been published in English.

The second volume of Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature: A Reader treats the literature of the Thaw and Stagnation periods (1954-1986). It includes translations of poetry and prose as well as scholarly texts that provide additional material for discussion. The goal of this volume is to present the range of ideas, creative experiments, and formal innovations that accompanied the social and political changes of the late Soviet era. Together with the introductory essays and biographical notes, the texts collected here will engage all students and interested readers of late Soviet Russian literature.

Developed as a reader for upper division undergraduates and beginning graduates, From Symbolism to Socialist Realism offers broad variety of materials contextualizing the literary texts most frequently read in Russian literature courses at this level. These approaches range from critical-theoretical articles, cultural and historical analyses, literary manifestos and declarations of literary aesthetics, memoirs of revolutionary terrorism and arrests by the NKVD, political denunciations, and "e;literary vignettes"e; capturing the spirit of its particular time in a nutshell. The voices of this "e;polyphonic"e; reader are diverse: Briusov, Savinkov, Ivanov-Razumnik, Kollontai, Tsvetaeva, Shklovsky, Olesha, Zoshchenko, Zhdanov, Grossman, Evtushenko, and others. The range of specialists on Russian culture represented here is equally broad: Clark, Erlich, Grossman, Nilsson, Peace, Poznansky, Siniavskii, and others. Together they evoke and illuminate a complex and tragic era.