Books in the Russian Transformations: Literature, Culture and Ideas series

This collection of essays is a milestone in the establishment of translation theory within the field of Russian literature and culture, an area that has been neglected in the Anglophone world. The volume is defined by the contributors' insistence that translation should be viewed as the accommodation of a new text within the host culture.

Stalin's Ghosts examines the impact of the Gothic-fantastic on Russian literature in the period 1920-1940. It shows how early Soviet-era authors, from well-known names including Fedor Gladkov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov and Evgenii Zamiatin, to niche figures such as Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and Aleksandr Beliaev, exploited traditional archetypes of this genre: the haunted castle, the deformed body, vampires, villains, madness and unnatural death. Complementing recent studies of Soviet culture by Eric Naiman and Lilya Kaganovsky, this book argues that Gothic-fantastic tropes functioned variously as a response to the traumas produced by revolution and civil war, as a vehicle for propaganda, and as a subtle mode of unwriting the cultural monolith of Socialist Realism.

This monograph examines the contributions of landscape design to authority and to organization of public life in imperial Russia. Analyzing how tsars and nobles inscribed their political aspirations in the gardens they designed or inhabited, this study maps out a distinct trajectory in the meaning of landscape design. Based partly on archival documents, it explores the reasons for Catherine the Great¿s keen interest in landscape design. It reconstructs Grigorii Potemkin¿s attempts to transform the Crimea physically and symbolically into the garden of the empire. And it reveals the centrality of the garden for noblemen such as Andrei Bolotov and Alexander Kurakin, who expressed their political philosophy and their anxieties about unstable social relations through landscaping. The book follows the destiny of western aesthetic categories, notably of the picturesque, as they are first adopted, then transformed, and ultimately rejected. It analyzes the historical role and mythological representations of the country estate, along with Leo Tolstoy¿s fraught commitment to Yasnaya Polyana and his critique of estate mythology in War and Peace. Finally, this study exposes how the current fashion for gardening in Russia, in particular among New Russians, alludes to imperial landscaping culture in order to justify a retreat from the public sphere.

Lydia Ginzburg (1902-1990) acted as a chronicler of the Soviet intelligentsia, and a philosopher-cum-ethnographer of the Leningrad Blockade. This collection of essays sheds new light on Ginzburg's contributions to Russian literature and literary studies, life-writing, subjectivity, ethics, the history of the novel and trauma studies.

Brings together memoirs, interviews, and archival research to construct an account of the world of poetry in Leningrad, in which famous figures began writing. This title describes the institutions, official events, and informal activities that were attended by young poets, including the pre-eminent poet of this generation, Iosif Brodsky.

Foolishness has long occupied a prominent place in Russian culture, touching on key questions of national, spiritual, and intellectual identity. Combining close readings with a contextual framework, this book offers a wide-ranging consideration of the causes and consequences of modern Russian literature's enduring quest for wisdom through folly.