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Academic Studies Press is proud to present this translation of
Professor Andrei Zorin's seminal Kormya Dvuglavogo Orla. This
collection of essays includes several that have never before
appeared in English, including "The People's War: The Time of
Troubles in Russian Literature, 1806-1807" and "Holy Alliances: V.
A. Zhukovskii's Epistle 'To Emperor Alexander' and Christian
Universalism."
From the country that has added to our vocabulary such colorful
terms as "purges," "pogroms," and "gulag," this collection
investigates the conspicuous marks of violence in Russian history
and culture.
Russians and non-Russians alike have long debated the reasons for
this endemic violence. Some have cited Russia's huge size,
unforgiving climate, and exposed geographical position as formative
in its national character, making invasion easy and order
difficult. Others have fixed the blame on cultural and religious
traditions that spurred internecine violence or on despotic rulers
or unfortunate episodes in the nation's history, such as the Mongol
invasion, the rule of Ivan the Terrible, or the "Red Terror" of the
revolution. Even in contemporary Russia, the specter of violence
continues, from widespread mistreatment of women to racial
antagonism, the product of a frustrated nationalism that manifests
itself in such phenomena as the wars in Chechnya.
" Times of Trouble" is the first in English to explore the problem
of violence in Russia. From a variety of perspectives, essays
investigate Russian history as well as depictions of violence in
the visual arts and in literature, including the works of Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nina Sadur. From
the Mongol invasion to the present day, topics include the gulag,
genocide, violence against women, anti-Semitism, and terrorism as a
tool of revolution.
The Enlightenment privileged vision as the principle means of
understanding the world, but the eighteenth-century Russian
preoccupation with sight was not merely a Western import. In his
masterful study, Levitt shows the visual to have had deep
indigenous roots in Russian Orthodox culture and theology, arguing
that the visual played a crucial role in the formation of early
modern Russian culture and identity. Levitt traces the early modern
Russian quest for visibility from jubilant self-discovery, to
serious reflexivity, to anxiety and crisis. The book examines
verbal constructs of sight-in poetry, drama, philosophy, theology,
essay, memoir-that provide evidence for understanding the special
character of vision of the epoch. Levitt's groundbreaking work
represents both a new reading of various central and lesser known
texts and a broader revisualization of Russian eighteenth-century
culture. Works that have considered the intersections of Russian
literature and the visual in recent years have dealt almost
exclusively with the modern period or with icons. The Visual
Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia is an important addition to
the scholarship and will be of major interest to scholars and
students of Russian literature, culture, and religion, and
specialists on the Enlightenment.
In an event acknowledged to be a watershed in modern Russian
cultural history, the elite of Russian intellectual life gathered
in Moscow in 1880 to celebrate the dedication of a monument to the
poet Alexander Pushkin, who had died nearly half a century earlier.
Private and government forces joined to celebrate a literary
figure, in a country in which monuments were usually dedicated to
military or political heroes. In this richly detailed narrative
history of the Pushkin Celebration and the developments that led up
to it, Marcus C. Levitt explores the unique role of literature in
nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life and puts Russian
literary criticism, and Pushkin's posthumous reputation, into fresh
perspective. Drawing on Soviet archival materials not readily
available in the West, Levitt describes the preparations for the
monument and the unfolding of the celebration. His sustained
discussions of Turgenev's role and of Dostoevsky's famous "Pushkin
Speech" shed new light on what was for both a culminating moment in
their careers. In Levitt's view, the Pushkin Celebration
represented the articulation of liberal, post-Emancipation hopes
for an independent Russian intelligentsia and culture. His analysis
of the problems faced by Russian liberalism illuminates the failure
of concerted efforts to secure freedom of speech in
nineteenth-century Russia.
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