Download or read book Russian Montparnasse written by Maria Rubins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reassesses the role of Russian Montparnasse writers in the articulation of transnational modernism generated by exile. Examining their production from a comparative perspective, it demonstrates that their response to urban modernity transcended the Russian master narrative and resonated with broader aesthetic trends in interwar Europe.

Download or read book Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora 1920 2020 written by Maria Rubins and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the century that has passed since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe. What happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries and begin to negotiate new experience gained in the process of migration? Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020 sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, countering its conventional reception as a subsidiary branch of national literature and reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland and origins to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, World Literature and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland. These diverse discussions are framed by a focused examination of diaspora as a methodological perspective and its relevance for the modern human condition.

Download or read book Twentieth Century Russian Poetry written by Katharine Hodgson and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The canon of Russian poetry has been reshaped since the fall of the Soviet Union. A multi-authored study of changing cultural memory and identity, this revisionary work charts Russia’s shifting relationship to its own literature in the face of social upheaval. Literary canon and national identity are inextricably tied together, the composition of a canon being the attempt to single out those literary works that best express a nation’s culture. This process is, of course, fluid and subject to significant shifts, particularly at times of epochal change. This volume explores changes in the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to the end of Putin’s second term as Russian President in 2008. In the wake of major institutional changes, such as the abolition of state censorship and the introduction of a market economy, the way was open for wholesale reinterpretation of twentieth-century poets such as Iosif Brodskii, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandel′shtam, their works and their lives. In the last twenty years many critics have discussed the possibility of various coexisting canons rooted in official and non-official literature and suggested replacing the term "Soviet literature" with a new definition – "Russian literature of the Soviet period". Contributions to this volume explore the multiple factors involved in reshaping the canon, understood as a body of literary texts given exemplary or representative status as "classics". Among factors which may influence the composition of the canon are educational institutions, competing views of scholars and critics, including figures outside Russia, and the self-canonising activity of poets themselves. Canon revision further reflects contemporary concerns with the destabilising effects of emigration and the internet, and the desire to reconnect with pre-revolutionary cultural traditions through a narrative of the past which foregrounds continuity. Despite persistent nostalgic yearnings in some quarters for a single canon, the current situation is defiantly diverse, balancing both the Soviet literary tradition and the parallel contemporaneous literary worlds of the emigration and the underground. Required reading for students, teachers and lovers of Russian literature, Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry brings our understanding of post-Soviet Russia up to date.

Download or read book A History of Russian Literature written by Andrew Kahn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 976 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. A History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. The volume proceeds chronologically in five parts, extending from Kievan Rus' in the 11th century to the present day.The coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic focus. Parts are organized thematically in chapters, which a number of keywords that are important literary concepts that can serve as connecting motifs and 'case studies', in-depth discussions of writers, institutions, and texts that take the reader up close and. Visual material also underscores the interrelation of the word and image at a number of points, particularly significant in the medieval period and twentieth century. The History addresses major continuities and discontinuities in the history of Russian literature across all periods, and in particular bring out trans-historical features that contribute to the notion of a national literature. The volume's time-range has the merit of identifying from the early modern period a vital set of national stereotypes and popular folklore about boundaries, space, Holy Russia, and the charismatic king that offers culturally relevant material to later writers. This volume delivers a fresh view on a series of key questions about Russia's literary history, by providing new mappings of literary history and a narrative that pursues key concepts (rather more than individual authorial careers). This holistic narrative underscores the ways in which context and text are densely woven in Russian literature, and demonstrates that the most exciting way to understand the canon and the development of tradition is through a discussion of the interrelation of major and minor figures, historical events and literary politics, literary theory and literary innovation.

Download or read book A History of Women s Writing in Russia written by Adele Marie Barker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-11 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Women's Writing in Russia offers a comprehensive account of the lives and works of Russia's women writers. Based on original and archival research, this volume forces a re-examination of many of the traditionally held assumptions about Russian literature and women's role in the tradition. In setting about the process of reintegrating women writers into the history of Russian literature, contributors have addressed the often surprising contexts within which women's writing has been produced. Chapters reveal a flourishing literary tradition where none was thought to exist. They redraw the map defining Russia's literary periods, they look at how Russia's women writers articulated their own experience, and they reassess their relationship to the dominant male tradition. The volume is supported by extensive reference features including a bibliography and guide to writers and their works.

Download or read book Murder Below Montparnasse written by Cara Black and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-lost Modigliani portrait, a grieving brother’s blood vendetta, a Soviet secret that’s been buried for 80 years—Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc’s current case is her most exciting one yet. The cobbled streets of Montparnasse might have been boho-chic in the 1920s, when artists, writers, and their muses drank absinthe and danced on cafe tables. But to Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc, these streets hold darker secrets. When an old Russian man named Yuri hires Aimée to protect a priceless painting that just might be a Modigliani, she learns how deadly art theft can be. Yuri is found tortured to death in his atelier, and the painting is missing. Every time Aimée thinks she's found a new witness, the body count rises. What exactly is so special about this painting that so many people are willing to kill—and die—for it?

Download or read book Nabokov Noir written by Luke Parker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nabokov Noir places Vladimir Nabokov's early literary career—from the 1920s to the 1940s—in the context of his fascination with silent and early sound cinema and the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie palaces, cultural Americanism, and surface culture. Luke Parker argues that Nabokov's engagement with the cinema and the dynamics of mass culture more broadly is an art of exile, understood both as literary poetics and practical strategy. Obsessive and competitive, fascinated and disturbed, Nabokov's Russian-language fiction and essays, written in Berlin, present a compelling rethinking of modernist-era literature's relationship to an unabashedly mass cultural phenomenon. Parker examines how Nabokov's involvement with the cinema as actor, screenwriter, moviegoer, and, above all, chronicler of the cinematized culture of interwar Europe enabled him to flourish as a transnational writer. Nabokov, Parker shows, worked tirelessly to court publishers and film producers for maximum exposure for his fiction across languages, media, and markets. In revealing the story of Nabokov's cinema praxis—his strategic instrumentalization of the movie industry—Nabokov Noir reconstructs the deft response of a modern master to the artificial isolation and shrinking audiences of exile.

Download or read book New Mecca New Babylon written by Robert H. Johnston and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1988-07-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three major waves of emigration from Soviet Russia followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War. While emigrants in the first wave have been identified mainly with a vague notion of aristocratic taxi drivers, Robert Johnston, through a collective biography of the roughly 120,000 Russians who lived in France during 1920-45, in particular in Paris, shows that this first wave of Russian emigrants made a much more significant contribution to French life and to western knowledge of Russia. Paris was the capital of "Russia Abroad," the home of an emigre generation which included figures from every field of Russian culture and every point of the political compass. Divided and diverse, the community was bound together in the hope and expectation of the downfall of Bolshevism and a return to Mother Russia. Members of the community believed that their mission in Paris was to preserve Russian culture, language, and liberty, a task which required educating France and the West about the true dangers of Communism. As their time away from Russia increased, however, the exiles found it difficult to preserve their organizations and customs and to resist the assimilation of French ways. Gradually the original refugees died, moved away, or surrendered to French culture: by 1951 only 35,000 Russian refugees remained in all of France. The Russian exiles in Paris lived on the margins of history. But though politically defeated, their struggle to defend what they saw as worthwhile Russian values, their efforts to survive, and their contributions to the life of their country of refuge have something to say to a later age, not least to their exiled "grandchildren", the current third wave of emigrants from the USSR.

Download or read book Shocking Paris written by Stanley Meisler and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a couple of decades before World War II, a group of immigrant painters and sculptors, including Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and Jules Pascin dominated the new art scene of Montparnasse in Paris. Art critics gave them the name "the School of Paris" to set them apart from the French-born (and less talented) young artists of the period. Modigliani and Chagall eventually attained enormous worldwide popularity, but in those earlier days most School of Paris painters looked on Soutine as their most talented contemporary. Willem de Kooning proclaimed Soutine his favorite painter, and Jackson Pollack hailed him as a major influence. Soutine arrived in Paris while many painters were experimenting with cubism, but he had no time for trends and fashions; like his art, Soutine was intense, demonic, and fierce. After the defeat of France by Hitler's Germany, the East European Jewish immigrants who had made their way to France for sanctuary were no longer safe. In constant fear of the French police and the German Gestapo, plagued by poor health and bouts of depression, Soutine was the epitome of the tortured artist. Rich in period detail, Stanley Meisler's Shocking Paris explores the short, dramatic life of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Modernist Diaspora written by Richard D. Sonn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years before, during, and after the First World War, hundreds of young Jews flocked to Paris, artistic capital of the world and center of modernist experimentation. Some arrived with prior training from art academies in Kraków, Vilna, and Vitebsk; others came armed only with hope and a few memorized phrases in French. They had little Jewish tradition in painting and sculpture to draw on, yet despite these obstacles, these young Jews produced the greatest efflorescence of art in the long history of the Jewish people. The paintings of Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Emmanuel Mané-Katz, the sculptures of Jacques Lipchitz, Ossip Zadkine, Chana Orloff, and works by many other artists now grace the world's museums. As the École de Paris was the most cosmopolitan artistic movement the world had seen, the left-bank neighborhood of Montparnasse became a meeting place for diverse cultures. How did the tolerant, bohemian atmosphere of Montparnasse encourage an international style of art in an era of bellicose nationalism, not to mention racism and antisemitism? How did immigrants not only absorb but profoundly influence a culture? This book examines how the clash of cultures produced genius.

Download or read book How it was Done in Paris written by Leonid Livak and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, reintroduced into literary circulation, is an ignored yet rich and original page in Russian literary history--the "unnoticed generation" of Russian writers who took up residence in France after the Bolshevik coup of 1917. Leonid Livak analyzes the position of these writers in the context of French modernist literature, examining the ways in which French literary life influenced émigré artistic identities and oeuvre. The book challenges commonly accepted notions of émigré isolation from French literature and culture and is instrumental in reaching a fuller understanding of the cultural mechanisms involved in the effort by an expatriate community to carry on a creative existence.

Download or read book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory written by Galin Tihanov and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the 1940s, when awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread, literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention. The Birth and Death of Literary Theory tells the story of literary theory by focusing on its formative interwar decades in Russia. Nowhere else did literary theory emerge and peak so early, even as it shared space with other modes of reflection on literature. A comprehensive account of every important Russian trend between the world wars, the book traces their wider impact in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. Ranging from Formalism and Bakhtin to the legacy of classic literary theory in our post-deconstruction, world literature era, Galin Tihanov provides answers to two fundamental questions: What does it mean to think about literature theoretically, and what happens to literary theory when this option is no longer available? Asserting radical historicity, he offers a time-limited way of reflecting upon literature—not in order to write theory's obituary but to examine its continuous presence across successive regimes of relevance. Engaging and insightful, this is a book for anyone interested in theory's origins and in what has happened since its demise.

Download or read book Midnight Train to Prague written by Carol Windley and published by Grove Atlantic. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Home Schooling returns with a timeless tale of friendship, romance, betrayal, and survival that spans two world wars. In 1927, as Natalia Faber travels from Berlin to Prague with her mother, their train is delayed in Saxon Switzerland. In the brief time the train is idle, Natalia learns the truth about her father—who she believed died during her infancy—and meets a remarkable woman named Dr. Magdalena Schaeffer, whose family will become a significant part of her future. Shaken by these events, Natalia arrives at a spa on the shore of Lake Hevíz in Hungary. Here, she meets Count Miklós Andorján, a journalist and adventurer. The following year, they will marry. Years later, Germany has invaded Russia. When Miklós fails to return from the eastern front, Natalia goes to Prague to wait for him. With a pack of tarot cards, she sets up shop as a fortune teller, and she meets Anna Schaeffer, the daughter of the woman she met decades earlier on that stalled train. The Nazis accuse Natalia of spying, and she is sent to a concentration camp. Though they are separated, her friendship with Anna grows as they fight to survive and to be reunited with their families. “An original and compelling story, told with vivid detail and a richness in setting that I absorbed in one sitting.”—Ellen Keith, bestselling author of The Dutch Wife Praise for Homeschooling “Carol Windley’s writing has a unique power, a perfect combination of delicacy, intensity, and fearless imagination.”—Alice Munro “Startlingly lovely.”—Seattle Times

Download or read book Deceit written by Yuri Felsen and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is . . . real literature, pure and honest.” —Vladimir Nabokov "The scintillating English-language debut from Felsen . . . [is] a fittingly volatile record of ruinous desire. —Publishers Weekly Once considered the 'Russian Proust', Yuri Felsen tells the story of an obsessive love affair set in interwar Europe in Deceit, an experimental novel in the form of a diary that is an as-yet-undiscovered landmark of Russian émigré literature. We meet our unnamed narrator in Paris in the 20s, where he finds himself an expat after the Russian Revolution. At a friend’s request he meets the beautiful, clever socialite Lyolya, also a recent exile from Russia. What begins as casual friendship quickly turns into fascination and obsession, as Lyolya gives mixed signals and pursues other men. Our narrator, emerging from a depression, is soon overwhelmed by the very idea of her, which begins to contour all of his observations, thoughts, and feelings. While Lyolya continues to live a life unencumbered by the forces of social convention, and history, our narrator’s revelations, written in diary form, grow increasingly painful, familiar, and rich with psychological introspection. Quite unlike any other writer in the Russian canon, Felsen evokes in poetic and idiosyncratic prose not only the Zeitgeist of interwar Europe and his émigré milieu, but also the existential crisis of the age.

Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov in Context written by David M. Bethea and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Nabokov, bilingual writer of dazzling masterpieces, is a phenomenon that both resists and requires contextualization. This book challenges the myth of Nabokov as a sole genius who worked in isolation from his surroundings, as it seeks to anchor his work firmly within the historical, cultural, intellectual and political contexts of the turbulent twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov in Context maps the ever-changing sites, people, cultures and ideologies of his itinerant life which shaped the production and reception of his work. Concise and lively essays by leading scholars reveal a complex relationship of mutual influence between Nabokov's work and his environment. Appealing to a wide community of literary scholars this timely companion to Nabokov's writing offers new insights and approaches to one of the most important, and yet most elusive writers of modern literature.

Download or read book Homeward from Heaven written by Boris Poplavsky and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homeward from Heaven is Boris Poplavsky’s masterpiece, written just before his life was cut short by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-two. Set in Paris and on the French Riviera, this final novel by the literary enfant terrible of the interwar Russian diaspora in France recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates. The novel’s protagonist and sometime narrator is Oleg, whose intense love for two women leads him along a journey of spiritual transfiguration. He follows Tania to a seaside resort, but after a passionate dalliance she jilts him. In the cafés of Montparnasse, Oleg meets Katia, with whom he finds physical intimacy and emotional candor, yet is unable to banish a lingering sense of existential disquiet and destitution. When he encounters Tania again in Paris, his quest to comprehend the laws of spiritual and physical love begins anew, with results that are both profound and tragic. Taken by Poplavsky’s contemporaries to be semiautobiographical, Homeward from Heaven stands out for its uncompromising depictions of sexuality and deprivation. Richly allusive and symbolic, the novel mixes psychological confession, philosophical reflection, and social critique in prose that is by turns poetic, mystical, and erotic. It is at once a work of daring literary modernism and an immersive meditation on the émigré condition.

Download or read book Everything or Almost Everything About Paris written by Jean-Christophe Napias and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The almost 200 entries in the addictive Everything (or Almost Everything) About Paris are a witty and sophisticated treasure trove of facts, histories, lists, records, quotations, and miscellaneous oddities that go well beyond trivia to include significant cultural information and an enlightening glimpse of Parisian life: • An explanation of the Parisian chant of disillusionment: "métro, boulot, dodo;" • Addresses and descriptions of vineyards within the city limits; • Ten vintage aperitifs to order in bistros; • Imaginary Parisian streets that appear in novels; • The number of brothels, massage parlors, and “places of pleasure” listed in a 1922 guidebook; • Famous poisonings that occurred in Paris; • Mottos of the five greatest educational institutions in Paris; • Fines charged for municipal infractions, from feeding pigeons (35€) to appearing nude in a public place (35,000€ and imprisonment); • Histories of the cobblestones, the rooftops, and the trashcans of Paris; • Names of the most famous can-can dancers of the mid-19th and early 20th century; • The odd and scandalous history of villa Félicien-Fabre in the 16th arrondissement; • Thirty significant paintings displayed in churches in Paris ...and much, much, much more.