Nikolai Klyuev

Nikolai Klyuev
Author: Michael Makin
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810126575

Nikolai Klyuev is the first book in English to examine the life and work of this enigmatic poet. Klyuev (1884–1937) rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as the first of the so-called "new peasant poets" but later fell victim to Stalinist hostility to both his cultural ideology and his homosexuality. He was arrested and exiled in 1933, then shot in 1937. Klyuev’s work incorporates rich elements of folklore, mysticism, politics, and religion, and he sometimes invokes arcane Russian syntax and vocabulary. Makin’s feat is particularly notable because Klyuev was often elusive in his own accounts of his life, and Makin successfully brings into focus the poet’s deliberate strategies of self-mythologization. Nikolai Klyuev is an indispensable guide to the life and the work of an important poet winning wider recognition outside of Russia.

The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism
Author: Stéphane Courtois
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 920
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674076082

This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.

Silver Age and After: Repressed Russian Poets, Artists and Philosophers during the Soviet Period

Silver Age and After: Repressed Russian Poets, Artists and Philosophers during the Soviet Period
Author: Roberto Echavarren
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2024-09-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

The details of the Jewish Holocaust have become part of our history through the testimony of those who survived the death camps. The details of Lenin’s and Stalin’s reign of terror are far less known because they took place behind a wall of secrecy, and because survivors have been loath to speak about them for fear of retribution. This is an encompassing volume presenting an intense display, as complete as can be, of poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers and intellectual actors implicated in different aspects of Russian life roughly through the period 1900-1960. They were people who had lived under the Soviet regime in times of peace and in times of war, from the Red Terror through the Great Terror. One must bear in mind the political and economic conditions in which those lives developed: the one-party rule placed above both the government and the citizens, the abashment of the division of powers, the suppression of private property and private economic initiative, the political police, and the GULAG. I deal with the poets in several chapters, then theater directors, then composers, then philosophers (these both in the introduction and in the play at the end of the book). Besides the Prologue and Introduction, the reader will find an Index of historical names, plus an extensive Bibliography. The work can be used for reference, for classroom adoption, for researchers/practitioners of Russian Literature, Political Studies, Slavic Studies, and Russian History.

Reference Guide to Russian Literature

Reference Guide to Russian Literature
Author: Neil Cornwell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1020
Release: 2013-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134260776

First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin
Author: Mikhail Bakhtin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2019-08-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1684480906

This annotated book is a first English translation of 12-hours of interviews of Victor Duvakin with Mikhail Bakhtin recorded in 1973. From Freud to Kant, from the French Symbolists to the German Romantics, Bakhtin shares his knowledge and appreciation of various Western European authors and thinkers. As a result, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, invites us to reconsider the importance of Western art and thought to Bakhtin himself, and Russian culture in general.

Handbook of Russian Literature

Handbook of Russian Literature
Author: Victor Terras
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 584
Release: 1985-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780300048681

Profiles the careers of Russian authors, scholars, and critics and discusses the history of the Russian treatment of literary genres such as drama, fiction, and essays

The Most Dangerous Art

The Most Dangerous Art
Author: Donald Loewen
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 0739120832

At a time in Russia's history when poets could be (and sometimes were) killed for a poem, the autobiographies of three prominent poets, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak, became a courageous defense of poetry. The Most Dangerous Art shows how these autobiographies trace an emotional trajectory that corresponds to the intensity of the social and state pressures that threatened Russian poets from the early 1920s to the late 1950s. During a period when literature became intensely political, and creative freedom became intensely risky, these autobiographies proclaim poetry's immortality and defend the poet's right to individual creativity against an increasingly threatening Soviet literary hierarchy. Donald Loewen provides detailed close readings of these biographies and juxtaposes these readings with historical context. The Most Dangerous Art is an illuminating contribution to the study of Russian literature. The volume is of special interest to researchers of 20th century Russian literature and autobiography.