Download or read book Saltykov Shchedrin s The Golovlyovs written by Irwin Paul Foote and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical look at the Russian gentry from the 1830s to the 1870s, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel The Golovlyovs exposes the insubstantiality of the family as one of the proclaimed bases of Russian social life. In sharp contrast to his contemporaries, including Aksakov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin shows the gentry family, as represented by the Golovlyovs, as disintegrating, corrupted by its status and way of life. The book, the sixth in the AATSEEL Critical Companions to Russian Literature series, begins with a brief sketch of Saltykov-Shchedrin's life and literary career, then goes on to explain the novel's content and characters, including reference to contemporary events relevant to the narrative and discussion of the major points of the novel and its conclusion. An extensive bibliography includes a listing and brief assessment of the various English translations of the novel.
Download or read book Two Lives and a Dream written by Marguerite Yourcenar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-11-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, "An Obscure Man" is the story of Nathanaël—innocent, open to experience—born like Everyman upon the stream of life. In "A Lovely Morning," Nathanaël's young son joins a touring company of Jacobean actors. "Anna, soror . . . ," the final tale, is an account of illicit passion in the baroque world of Naples. "An Obscure Man swarms with life. This intricately researched, imaginative, beautifully written tale of a young man's brief life in the mid-17th century is entirely engrossing."—Leona Weiss, San Francisco Chronicle "In these three stories, [Yourcenar] succeeds in making the essences of these past lives a part of the reader's future through the sheer intensity of their portrayal."—Margaret Ezell, Houston Chronicle
Download or read book Life Is Elsewhere written by Anne Lounsbery and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.
Download or read book Russian Grotesque Realism written by Ani Kokobobo and published by . This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a rereading of the Russian realist novel and proposes a hybrid genre, grotesque realism, to describe changes during the post-Reform era.
Download or read book City Folk and Country Folk written by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This scathingly funny comedy of manners” by the rediscovered female Russian novelist “will deeply satisfy fans of 19th-century Russian literature” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). City Folk and Country Folk is a seemingly gentle yet devastating satire of the aristocratic and pseudo-intellectual elites of 1860s Russia. Translated into English for the first time, the novel weaves a tale of manipulation, infatuation, and female assertiveness that takes place one year after the liberation of the empire's serfs. Upending Russian literary clichés of female passivity and rural gentry benightedness, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya centers her story on a common-sense, hardworking noblewoman and her self-assured daughter living on their small rural estate. Throwing off the imposed sense of duty toward their "betters", these two women ultimately triumph over the urbanites' financial, amorous, and matrimonial machinations. Sofia Khvoshchinskaya and her writer sisters closely mirror Britain's Brontës, yet Khvoshchinskaya's work contains more of Jane Austen's wit and social repartee, as well as an intellectual engagement reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell's condition-of-England novels. Written by a woman under a male pseudonym, this exploration of gender dynamics in post-emancipation Russian offers a new and vital point of comparison with the better-known classics of nineteenth-century world literature.
Download or read book The Pompadours written by Михаил Евграфович Салтыков and published by Ann Arbor : Ardis Publishers. This book was released on 1985 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Golovlyov Family written by M. E. Saltykov-Ščedrin and published by Ardis Publishers. This book was released on 1977 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Golovyov Family is a thought-provoking and powerfully written novel. Recognized as a classic since it first publication in Russia in 1880, it recounts the history of a family of landowners through three generations. In a letter written shortly after the book’s publication, the author reflected that "I wrote The Golovyov Family as an attack on the family principal." As Russian scholar Carl Proffer wrote: "Gogol has been passed from school to school for thirteen decades. Even Bulgakov, who regarded Saltykov-Schhedrin as his teacher, who is the most satirical writer after Saltykov, and whose main works were unpublished until ten years ago, has been written about by representatives of many different critical sects. That Saltykov's works have not had this kind of appeal is somewhat puzzling. Even a Freudian novice could work Oedipal themes out of the autobiographical elements in The Golovlyov Family, and the Tartu University school could draw complex diagrams to show how The Golovyov Family is that most wonderful of all things, a "unified whole." It is time that Saltykov stopped being the exclusive property of critics whose primary concerns are sociological or historical. As the reader of The Golovlyov Family will see with considerable pleasure Saltykov’s prose has much more to offer than not."
Download or read book Earthly Signs written by Marina Tsvetaeva and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva’s unique poetics. Includes black and white photographs.
Download or read book Unknown Masterpieces written by Edwin Frank and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2003-07-31 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original collection, several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books. Here Toni Morrison celebrates a great Guinean storyteller whose novel of mystical adventure and surprising revelation transforms our image of Africa, while Susan Sontag raises the curtain on a distant summer when three of the greatest poets of the twentieth century exchanged love letters like no others. Here too John Updike analyzes the rare art of an English comic genius, Jonathan Lethem considers a hard-boiled and heartbreaking story of prison life, and Michael Cunningham uncovers the secrets of what may well be the finest short novel in modern American literature. Other contributors include such noted authors as Arthur C. Danto, Lydia Davis, Elizabeth Hardwick, Francine Prose, Lucy Sante, Colm Tóibín, Eliot Weinberger, and James Wood. Lucid, polished, provocative, inspiring, these essays are models of critical appreciation, offering personal, impassioned, thoughtful responses to a wide range of wonderful books. Unknown Masterpieces is a treat for all lovers of great writing and a useful and stimulating guidebook for readers eager to venture off literature's beaten tracks. Eliot Weinberger on Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley Arthur C. Danto on The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac John Updike on Seven Men by Max Beerbohm Jonathan Lethem on On the Yard by Malcolm Braly Toni Morrison on The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye Colm Tóibín on The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley Francine Prose on A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes Susan Sontag on Letters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke Lucy Sante on Classic Crimes by William Roughead James Wood on The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin Elizabeth Hardwick on The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger Lydia Davis on The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal Michael Cunningham on The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott
Download or read book Diary of a Madman The Government Inspector Selected Stories written by Nikolay Gogol and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author, dramatist and satirist, Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852) deeply influenced later Russian literature with his powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty beaurocracy and base corruption. This volume includes both his most admired short fiction and his most famous drama. A biting and frequently hilarious political satire, The Government Inspector has been popular since its first performance and was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest Russian play every written. The stories gathered here, meanwhile, range from comic to tragic and describe the isolated lives of low-ranking clerks, lunatics and swindlers. They include Diary of a Madman, an amusing but disturbing exploration of insanity; Nevsky Prospect, a depiction of an artist besotted with a prostitute; and The Overcoat, a moving consideration of poverty that powerfully influenced Dostoevsky and later Russian literature.
Download or read book The Golovlyov Family written by Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov and published by Hyperion Books. This book was released on 1977 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Strudlhof Steps written by Heimito von Doderer and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English translation of an essential Austrian novel about life in early-twentieth-century Vienna, as seen through a wide and varied cast of characters. The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the early twentieth century, a vast novel crowded with characters ranging from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat to an innocent ingenue to “respectable” shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is Vienna, which Heimito von Doderer renders as distinctly as James Joyce does Dublin or Alfred Döblin does Berlin. Interweaving two time periods, 1908 to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, the novel takes the monumental eponymous outdoor double staircase as a governing metaphor for its characters’ intersecting and diverging fates. The Strudlhof Steps is an experimental tour de force with the suspense and surprise of a soap opera. Here Doderer illuminates the darkness of passing years with the dazzling extravagance that is uniquely his.
Download or read book Metaphysical Exile written by Robert Pippin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Pippin presents here the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy as a whole. Pippin treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place. While discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin also treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of theimplications of a deeper kind of homelessness--a version that characterizes late modern life itself--and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge.
Download or read book Tolstoy written by A. N. Wilson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1988 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark biography of Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, A. N. Wilson narrates the complex drama of the writer's life: his childhood of aristocratic privilege but emotional deprivation, his discovery of his literary genius after aimless years of gambling and womanizing, and his increasingly disastrous marriage. Wilson sweeps away the long-held belief that Tolstoy's works were the exact mirror of his life, and instead traces the roots of Tolstoy's art to his relationship with God, with women, and with Russia. He also breaks new ground in recreating the world that shaped the great novelist's life and art--the turmoil of ideas and politics in nineteenth-century Russia and the incredible literary renaissance that made Tolstoy's work possible. "Admirable. . . . Absorbing. . . . Superb."--Anthony Burgess "Stands as a model of the biographer's art: intelligent and opinionated, yet judicious--and, what's more, deliciously readable."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Download or read book Chasing Homer written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic escape nightmare, Chasing Homer is sped on not only by Krasznahorkai’s signature velocity, but also by a unique musical score and intense illustrations In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed—careening through Europe, heading blindly South. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death: the past did not exist, only what was current existed—a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that had no continuation … Krasznahorkai—celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose—outdoes himself in Chasing Homer. And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful full-color paintings by Max Neumann and—reaching out of the book proper—the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes).
Download or read book The Queue written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vladimir Sorokin’s first published novel, The Queue, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet “years of stagnation.” Thousands of citizens are in line for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn’t matter–if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin’s tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on."--Amazon.com.
Download or read book Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk written by Nikolai Leskov and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of the renowned Russian writer's best short work, including a masterful translation of the famous title story. Nikolai Leskov is the strangest of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to the oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin's great essay "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the strange, melancholy, but also worldly-wise yarns of an older, slower era that Leskov remained in touch with. The title story is a tale of illicit love and multiple murder that could easily find its way into a Scottish ballad and did go on to become the most popular of Dmitri Shostakovich's operas. The other stories, all but one newly translated, present the most focused and finely rendered collection of this indispensable writer currently available in English.
