Download or read book Akim Volynsky written by Helen Tolstoy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-11-28 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Akim Volynsky: A Hidden Russian-Jewish Prophet Helen Tolstoy goes far beyond the accepted image of Akim Volynsky as a controversial literary critic of the 1890s who ran the first journal of Russian Symbolists, promoted philosophic idealism and proposed the first modernist reading of Dostoevsky. This book, through the study of periodicals and archive materials, offers a new view of Volynsky as a champion of Symbolist theater, supporter of Jewish playwrights, an ardent partisan of Habima theater and finally, a theoretician of Jewish theater. Throughout his life, Volynsky was a seeker of a Jewish-Christian synthesis, both religious and moral. His grand universalist view made him the first to see the true value of leading Russian writers – his contemporaries Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
Download or read book Ballet s Magic Kingdom written by A. L. Volynskiĭ and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Akim Volynsky was a Russian literary critic, journalist, and art historian who became Saint Petersburgs liveliest and most prolific ballet critic in the early part of the twentieth century. This book, the first English edition of his provocative and influential writings, provides a striking look at life inside the world of Russian ballet at a crucial era in its history. Stanley J. Rabinowitz selects and translates forty of Volynskys articlesvivid, eyewitness accounts that sparkle with details about the careers and personalities of such dance luminaries as Anna Pavlova, Mikhail Fokine, Tamara Karsavina, and George Balanchine, at that time a young dancer in the Maryinsky company whose keen musical sense and creative interpretive power Volynsky was one of the first to recognize. Rabinowitz also translates Volynskys magnum opus, The Book of Exaltations, an elaborate meditation on classical dance technique that is at once a primer and an ideological treatise. Throughout his writings, Rabinowitz argues in his critical introduction, which sets Volynskys life and work against the backdrop of the principal intellectual currents of his time, Volynsky emphasizes the spiritual and ethereal qualities of ballet.
Download or read book And Then Came Dance written by Stanley J. Rabinowitz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance written by Naomi M. Jackson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to recent evolutions in the fields of dance and religious and secular studies, The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance documents and celebrates the significant impact of Jewish identity on a variety of communities and the dance world writ large. Focusing on North America, Europe, and Israel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this Handbook highlights the sometimes surprising, often hidden and overlooked Jewish resonances within a range of styles from modern and postmodern dance to folk dance and flamenco. Privileging the historically marginalized voices of scholars, performers, and instructors the Handbook considers the powerful role of dance in addressing difference, such as between American and Israeli Jewish communities. In the process, contributors advocate values of social justice, like Tikkun Olam (repair of the world), debate, and humor, exploring the fascinating and potentially uncomfortable contradictions and ambiguities that characterize this robust area of research.
Download or read book Jewishness in Russian Culture written by Leonid Katsis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewishness in Russian Culture is devoted to new approaches and methods for the study of Jewish acculturation in Russian literature and its effects. It attempts to redefine criteria and borders of a discipline situated roughly between Judaica Rossica and Rossica Judaica. The monograph describes a series of important literary Russian-Jewish cultural events and figures belonging synchronically or diachronically to both disciplines. Thus it unites within a new conceptual framework the data accumulated by scholars and disciplines that exist separately in different research spaces that do not overlap, Jewish Studies and the history of Russian culture. The emerging picture shows the development of a historical plot along the axis of acculturation and anti-Semitism, accepting and/or trying to be accepted, being rejected and/or rejecting, and being within or without.
Download or read book The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar written by Mark Franko and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is an examination of neoclassical ballet initially in the French context before and after World War I (circa 1905-1944) with close attention to dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar. Since the critical discourses I analyze indulge in flights of poetic fancy I distinguish in my discussion of this material between the Lifar-image (the dancer on stage and object of discussion by critics), the Lifar-discourse (the writings on Lifar as well as his own discourse), and the Lifar-person (the historical actor). This topic is further developed in the final chapter into a discussion of the so-called Baroque dance both as a historical object and as a motif of contemporary experimentation as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II (circa 1947-1991) in France. Using Lifar as a through-line, the book explores the development of critical ideas of neoclassicism in relation to his work and his drift toward a fascist position that can be traced to the influence of Nietzsche on his critical reception. Lifar's collaborationism during the Occupation confirms this analysis. My discussion of neoclassicism begins in the final years of the nineteenth-century and carries us through the Occupation; I then track the Baroque in its gradual development from the early 1950s through the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. "--
Download or read book The Writer in Petrograd and the House of Arts written by Martha Weitzel Hickey and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-16 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded by Maksim Gorky and Kornei Chukovsky in 1919 and disbanded in 1922, the Petrograd House of Arts occupied a crucial moment in Russia's cultural history. By chronicling the rise and fall of this literary landmark, this book conveys in greater depth and detail than ever before a significant but little studied period in Soviet literature. Poised between Russian culture's past and her Soviet future, between pre- and post-Revolutionary generations, this once lavish private home on the Nevsky Prospekt housed as many as fifty-six poets, novelists, critics, and artists at one time, during a period of great social and political turbulence. And as such, Hickey contends, the House of Arts served as a crucible for a literature in transition. Hickey shows how the House of Arts, though virtually ignored by Soviet-era cultural historians, played a critical role in shaping the lively literature of the next decade, a literature often straddling the border between fiction and non-fiction. Considering prose writers such as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Olga Forsh, the Serapion Brothers group, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, as well as poets including Alexander Blok, Nikolay Gumilev, Anna Radlova, Osip Mandelstam, and Vladislav Khodasevich, she traces the comings and goings at the House of Arts: the meetings and readings and lectures and, most of all, the powerful influence of these interactions on those who briefly lived and worked there. In her work, the Petrograd House of Arts appears for the first time in all its complexity and importance, as a focal point for the social and cultural ferment of the day, and a turning point in the direction of Russian literature and criticism.
Download or read book And Then Came Dance written by Stanley J. Rabinowitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is.
Download or read book Shostakovich A Life Remembered written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is a unique study of the great composer, drawn from the reminiscences and reflections of his contemporaries. Elizabeth Wilson sheds light on the composer's creative process and his working life in music, and examines the enormous and enduring influence that Shostakovich has had on Soviet musical life.'The one indispensable book about the composer.' New York Times
Download or read book Russian Culture in Modern Times written by Robert P. Hughes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acceptance of Christianity in the tenth century is the most significant cultural event in the history of modern Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia. Now Slavic specialists, theologians, historians, and literary scholars can turn to a collection that examines the majestic sweep of a thousand years of Slavic Christianity. This three-volume collection brings together essays from two international conferences. The present volume explores cultural history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Volume I (published in 1993) examines the history and influences of Christianization from the tenth to the seventeenth century, and Volume III will focus on the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Life of a Poet written by Ralph Freedman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this outstanding biography, Ralph Freedman traces Rilke's extraordinary career by combining detailed accounts of salient episodes from the poet's restless life with an intimate reading of the verse and prose that refract them."
Download or read book Writings on Ballet and Music written by Fedor Lopukhov and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although little-known in the West, Fedor Lopukhov was a leading figure in Russia's dance world for more than sixty years and an influence on many who became major figures in Western dance, such as George Balanchine. As a choreographer, he staged the first post-revolutionary productions of traditional ballets like Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty as well as avant-garde and experimental works, including Dance Symphony, Bolt, and a highly controversial version of The Nutcracker. This first publication in English of Lopukhov's theoretical writings will give readers a clear understanding of his seminal importance in dance history and illuminate his role in the development of dance as a nonnarrative, musically based form. These writings present the rationale behind Lopukhov's attempt to develop a "symphonic" ballet that would integrate the formal and expressive elements of dance and music. They also show his finely detailed knowledge of the classical heritage and his creative efforts to transmit major works to future generations. This edition explains not only the making of his own controversial Dance Symphony but also the issues he saw at stake in productions of Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, and other key works by Petipa and Fokine. Lopukhov's writings argue the details of choreographic devices with an unusual degree of precision, and his comments on composers and the musical repertoire used by his predecessors and contemporaries are equally revealing. Stephanie Jordan's introduction deftly situates these writings within the context of Lopukhov's life and career and in relation to the theories, aesthetics, and practices of dance in the twentieth century.
Download or read book St Petersburg written by Solomon Volkov and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive cultural biography of the “Venice of the North” and its transcendent artistic and spiritual legacy, written by Russian emerge and acclaimed cultural historian, Solomon Volkov. Long considered to be the mad dream of an imperious autocrat—the "Venice of the North," conceived in a setting of malarial swamps—St. Petersburg was built in 1703 by Peter the Great as Russia's gateway to the West. For almost 300 years this splendid city has survived the most extreme attempts of man and nature to extinguish it, from flood, famine, and disease to civil war, Stalinist purges, and the epic 900-day siege by Hitler's armies. It has even been renamed twice, and became St. Petersburg again only in 1991. Yet not only has it retained its special, almost mystical identity as the schizophrenic soul of modern Russia, but it remains one of the most beautiful and alluring cities in the world. Now Solomon Volkov, a Russian emigre and acclaimed cultural historian, has written the definitive cultural biography of this city and its transcendent artistic and spiritual legacy. For Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, Petersburg was a spectral city that symbolized the near-apocalyptic conflicts of imperial Russia. As the monarchy declined, allowing intellectuals and artists to flourish, Petersburg became a center of avant-garde experiment and flamboyant bohemian challenge to the dominating power of the state, first czarist and then communist. The names of the Russian modern masters who found expression in St. Petersburg still resonate powerfully in every field of art: in music, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich; in literature, Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Nabokov, and Brodsky; in dance, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and Balanchine; in theater, Meyerhold; in painting, Chagall and Malevich; and many others, whose works are now part of the permanent fabric of Western civilization. Yet no comprehensive portrait of this thriving distinctive, and highly influential cosmopolitan culture, and the city that inspired it, has previously been attempted.
Download or read book In Stravinsky s Orbit written by Klara Moricz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bolsheviks’ 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with the new cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet trends. In this book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris. Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants’ and the Bolsheviks’ contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky’s disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although Stravinsky’s neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.
Download or read book Oxford Slavonic Papers New Series 1997 written by G. S. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-18 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [see short description]
Download or read book Ida Rubinstein written by Judith Chazin-Bennahum and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ida Rubinstein (1883–1960) captivated Paris's dancers, composers, artists, and audiences from her time in the Ballets Russes in 1909 to her final performances in 1939. Trained in Russia as an actress and a dancer, her life spanned the artistic freedom of the Belle Époque through the ravages of World War I, the Depression, and finally World War II. This critical biography carefully examines aspects of Rubinstein's life and career that have previously received little attention. These include her early life in Russia, her writing about performance aesthetics, her curated approach to acting and dancing roles, and her encumbered position as a woman and a Jew. Rubinstein used her considerable fortune to produce dozens of plays, lyric creations, and ballets, making her one of the foremost producers of the first half of the twentieth century. Employing the greatest scenic artists, Léon Bakst and Alexander Benois; the distinguished composers Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, and Claude Debussy; celebrated writers including Paul Valéry and André Gide; and the brilliant choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, Rubinstein transformed twentieth-century theater and dance.
Download or read book Christianity and the Eastern Slavs Volume II written by Robert P. Hughes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-07-26 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication in three volumes originated in papers delivered at two conferences held in May 1988 at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, DC. Like many other conferences organized that year in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union, they were convened to commemorate the millennium of the acceptance of Christianity in Rus'. This collection of essays throws light on the enormous, truly unique role that the Christian tradition has played throughout the centuries in shaping the nations that spring from Kievan Rus'—the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. Although these volumes devote greater attention to Russian culture, the investigation of the issue in the history of Christianity in Ukrainian and Belorussian cultures occupies an important and integral part of the project. Volume ISlavic Cultures in the Middle AgesEdited by Boris Gasparov and Olga Raevsky-Hughes Volume IIRussian Culture in Modern TimesEdited by Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno Volume IIIRussian Literature in Modern TimesEdited by Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, Irina Paperno, and Olga Raevsky-Hughes This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
