For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the "mythopoetic thinking" that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of "erasure" and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their art is increasingly moot. The lichnost' (personhood, psychic totality) of the given writer is all-important, argues Bethea, as it is that which combines the specifically biographical and the capaciously mythical in verbal units that speak simultaneously to different planes of being. Pushkin's Evgeny can be one incarnation of the poet himself and an Everyman rising up to challenge Peter's new world order; Brodsky can be, all at once, Dante and Mandelstam and himself, the exile paying an Orphic visit to Florence (and, by ghostly association, Leningrad). This sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers' lives, is Bethea's primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea's most memorable previously published essays along with new studies prepared for this occasion.

Barcelona Prose is a collection of autobiographical essays by the gifted translator, literary scholar, and dissident, Efim Etkind. These engaging, deeply psychological vignettes capture the reality of daily life and work in the Soviet Union. Unlike other memoirists who have faced hardships, Etkind's tone is never cruel or embittered. Told through the lens of a practiced scholar, he captures the absurdity of a cultural-political experiment that destroyed his family's life, his own career, and that of many of his colleagues. By the time of Etkind's death, he did not rework these essays into a continuous narrative. Originally published in Russian, this first-ever English translation prepared by Etkind's daughter presents his memoirs as a document of his time, without any changes or abridgements. The editors' additions are limited to several notes, proofreading of quotes, and checking or inserting the full forms of the characters' names.

Barcelona Prose is a collection of autobiographical essays by the gifted translator, literary scholar, and dissident, Efim Etkind. These engaging, deeply psychological vignettes capture the reality of daily life and work in the Soviet Union. Unlike other memoirists who have faced hardships, Etkind's tone is never cruel or embittered. Told through the lens of a practiced scholar, he captures the absurdity of a cultural-political experiment that destroyed his family's life, his own career, and that of many of his colleagues. By the time of Etkind's death, he did not rework these essays into a continuous narrative. Originally published in Russian, this first-ever English translation prepared by Etkind's daughter presents his memoirs as a document of his time, without any changes or abridgements. The editors' additions are limited to several notes, proofreading of quotes, and checking or inserting the full forms of the characters' names.

For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the "mythopoetic thinking" that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of "erasure" and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their art is increasingly moot. The lichnost' (personhood, psychic totality) of the given writer is all-important, argues Bethea, as it is that which combines the specifically biographical and the capaciously mythical in verbal units that speak simultaneously to different planes of being. Pushkin's Evgeny can be one incarnation of the poet himself and an everyman rising up to challenge Peter's new world order; Brodsky can be, all at once, Dante and Mandelstam and himself, the exile paying an Orphic visit to Florence (and, by ghostly association, Leningrad). It is this sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers' lives, that is Bethea's primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea's most memorable previously published essays along with new and expanded studies prepared for this occasion.

This research focuses on reducing computational time in parameter optimization by using multiple surrogates and subprocess CPU times without compromising the quality of the results. This is motivated by applications that have objective functions with expensive computational times at high delity solutions. Applying, matching, and tuning optimization techniques at an algorithm level can reduce the time spent on unpro table computations for parameter optimization. The objective is to recover known parameters of a -ow property reference image by comparing to a template image that comes from a computational -uid dynamics simulation, followed by a numerical image registration and comparison process. Mixed variable pattern search and mesh adaptive direct search methods were applied using surrogate functions in the search step to produce solutions within a tolerance level of experimental observations. The surrogate functions are based on previous function values and computational times of those values. The use of multiple surrogates at each search step provides parameter selections that lead to improved solutions of an objective function evaluation with less computational time. Previously computed values for the objective function and computation time were used to compute a time cut-o parameter that allows termination during an objective function evaluation if the computational time exceeded a threshold or a divergent template image was created. This approach was tested using DACE and radial basis function surrogates within the NOMADm MATLABr software. The numerical results are presented.