Border Conditions combines history and memory studies with literary and cultural studies to examine lives at the limits of contemporary Europe—those of the half-million Russian-speakers who live in Latvia. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Latvia's Russian-speakers have balanced between Russia and Europe and between a socialist past, a capitalist and liberal present, and the illiberal regime rising in the Russian Federation. Kevin M. F. Platt describes how the members of this population have worked to define themselves through art, literature, cultural institutions, film, and music—and how others, from the Russian Federation or the Latvian state, have sought to define them. Efforts to make sense of the border condition of Russian-speakers in Latvia often raise more questions than they answer—not just about this population, but about competing world orders on all sides. At the end of the Cold War, many anticipated that societies across the globe could come to consensus about the meaning of past history and the bases for a just politics in the present. The view from the borders of Europe demonstrates the deep contradictions pertaining to fundamental terms such as empire, state socialism, liberalism, and nation that have made it impossible to achieve such a consensus. Platt decenters the study of history and memory in Eastern Europe, refocusing the examination of state socialism's aftermath around questions of empire and post-colonialism. Border Conditions helps us understand the distinctions between Russian and Western worldviews driving military confrontation to this day.

Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when ""Russian"" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic ""home"" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and cultural life of Russians who in successive waves of migration have dispersed to the United States, Europe, and Israel, or who remained after the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian states. The volume's internationally renowned contributors treat the many different global Russian cultures not as ""displaced"" elements of Russian cultural life but rather as independent entities in their own right. They describe diverse forms of literature, music, film, and everyday life that transcend and defy political, geographic, and even linguistic borders. Arguing that Russian cultures today are many, this volume contends that no state or society can lay claim to be the single or authentic representative of Russianness. In so doing, it contests the conceptions of culture and identity at the root of nation-building projects in and around Russia.

Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution--figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov--"Epic Revisionism" tells the fascinating story of these individuals' return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era. An inherently interdisciplinary project, "Epic Revisionism" features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. This volume pairs scholarly essays with selections drawn from Stalin-era primary sources--newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories--to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history.
"These scholars shed a great deal of light not only on Stalinist culture but on the politics of cultural production under the Soviet system."--David L. Hoffmann, "Slavic Review"

"Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press"
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was a skilled love poet who, through no choice of her own, became a witness to mass violence, a widely recognized exemplar of endurance and moral strength, and finally a symbol of Russian national resilience. At the start of her career, during the final years of the Russian Empire, Akhmatova was a cultural celebrity who fascinated a generation not only with her poetry but also with the drama that she created around herself.
After the revolution of 1917, she was attacked as a decadent bourgeois author and driven into silence and obscurity. Living in relative poverty, with her family and friends repeatedly arrested and harassed, and she herself publicly cursed by the representatives of the state, Akhmatova survived the darkest decades of Soviet history. Near the end of her life, when timorous cultural bureaucrats allowed her to reemerge as a public figure, she revealed to readers that even if the "collective" had rejected her as an unworthy member she had continued to write poetry reflecting the trials and calamities of Soviet men and women with greater truth and moral authority than any official poet could attain.

In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed.

Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation's collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power past, present, future in Russia."

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Modernist Archaist offers a comprehensive English-language selection of Osip Mandelstam's poetry, edited by Russian scholar Kevin M. F. Platt, who also contributes an illuminating essay. New translations by notable contemporary poets combined with an exceptional selection of previous translations are representative of the most up-to-date interpretation of Mandelstam's work. Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), one of the most significant poets of twentieth-century Russian literature, also embodied more fully than any other its profound paradoxes. He was a Jew born in Poland who became a leading Russian poet. He was a committed Modernist who was nevertheless faithful to the great examples and strict forms of the past literary tradition. Most strikingly, he was a rebel and radical thinker who was ultimately hounded to death as an "enemy" of the revolutionary Soviet society. Yet while Mandelstam's poetry bore witness to the convulsions of twentieth-century Russian culture and politics, it was by no means limited or defined by these historical contexts. In an early statement of his creative credo Mandelstam wrote: "for an artist, a worldview is a tool or a means, like a hammer in the hands of a mason, and the only reality is the work of art itself." The poems offered in this volume, about half of them appearing in previously unpublished translations, present an overview of Mandelstam's major works. Introductory materials include an essay on his life and poetry.

Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when "Russian" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic "home" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and cultural life of Russians who in successive waves of migration have dispersed to the United States, Europe, and Israel, or who remained after the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian states. The volume's internationally renowned contributors treat the many different global Russian cultures not as "displaced" elements of Russian cultural life but rather as independent entities in their own right. They describe diverse forms of literature, music, film, and everyday life that transcend and defy political, geographic, and even linguistic borders. Arguing that Russian cultures today are many, this volume contends that no state or society can lay claim to be the single or authentic representative of Russianness. In so doing, it contests the conceptions of culture and identity at the root of nation-building projects in and around Russia.