This original three-part study examines Russia, Russians and their culture in Joyce's life and establishes a Russian theme running through his work as a whole, from the earliest writings to Finnegans Wake. It discusses contacts and parallels between Joyce and three Russian figures: Bely, Nabokov and Eisenstein (and, more briefly, Pasternak). Thirdly, it details the Soviet reception of Joyce from 1922 until publication of the first Russian Ulysses in 1989, as well as surveying Marxist approaches to Joyce. A full bibliography of Russian and western sources is included.

This book takes four stories by the Russian Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky to illustrate 'pathways', developed further by subsequent writers, into modern fiction. Featured here are: the artistic (musical story), the rise of science fiction, psychic aspects of the detective story, and of confession in the novel. The four chapters also examine the development of the featured categories by a wide range of subsequent writers in fiction ranging from the Romantic period up to the present century. The study works backwards from Odoevsky's stories, noting respective previous examples or traditions, before proceeding to follow the 'pathways' observed into later Russian, English and comparative fiction. Whilst appealing to specialists in Russian and comparative literature, these chapters are accessible to a student readership taking courses involving the main areas featured - including the arts in literature, fictional artistic biography, interplanetary flight and civilisations, detective fiction, and novelistic confession. -- .

Odoyevsky (1804-1869) was a leading writer, musicologist, popular educator and public servant in Russia, close to the major historical events of his period and acquainted with many of the leading personalities, from Pushkin to Glinka, to Turgenev, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, as well as Berlioz and Wagner. Based upon published and unpublished sources in Russia and the West, Cornwell paints a portrait of one of Russia's central figures, though little known in the West.

Vladimir Odoevsky (1804-1869) was a fascinating and encyclopedic figurein nineteenth-century Russian culture, who in his day was mentioned in the same breath as Pushkin and Gogol. Thinker, pedagogue, musicologist, amateur scientist and public servant, he is now undergoing a revival as a virtually rediscovered writer of Romantic and Gothic fiction. The author, a leading specialist on Odoevsky, analyses the contribution of Odoevsky to Russian prose fiction and in particular his influential approach to Romanticism, his Gothic novellas and his proto-science fiction, as well as his critical reception.

The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is an engaging and accessible guide to Russian writing of the past thousand years.
The volume covers the entire span of Russian literature, from the Middle Ages to the post-Soviet period, and explores all the forms that have made it so famous: poetry, drama and, of course, the Russian novel. A particular emphasis is given to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Russian literature achieved world-wide recognition through the works of writers such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. Covering a range of subjects including women's writing, Russian literary theory, socialist realism and émigré writing, leading international scholars open up the wonderful diversity of Russian literature.
With recommended lists of further reading and an excellent up-to-date general bibliography, The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is the perfect guide for students and general readers alike.

The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is an engaging and accessible guide to Russian writing of the past thousand years.
The volume covers the entire span of Russian literature, from the Middle Ages to the post-Soviet period, and explores all the forms that have made it so famous: poetry, drama and, of course, the Russian novel. A particular emphasis is given to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Russian literature achieved world-wide recognition through the works of writers such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. Covering a range of subjects including women's writing, Russian literary theory, socialist realism and émigré writing, leading international scholars open up the wonderful diversity of Russian literature.
With recommended lists of further reading and an excellent up-to-date general bibliography, The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is the perfect guide for students and general readers alike.

This guide provides informative essays and selective bibliographies on the main writers of Russian for students and general readers. Covering all of Russian literature, this handbook emphasizes 19th- and 20th-century authors. The guide uses the Western alphabet, so anonymous works appear under their English title and are interfiled in alphabetical order with author entries. Entries for writers include a brief biography, a list of the writer's primary works in chronological order, a selected list of bibliographies, and critical studies. The guide begins with 13 detailed essays that cover most periods, topics, and genres of Russian literature. This reference source belongs in all libraries with large literature collections".--"Outstanding Reference Sources : the 1999 Selection of New Titles", American Libraries, May 1999. Comp. by the Reference Sources Committee, RUSA, ALA.

This original three-part study examines Russia, Russians and their culture in Joyce's life and establishes a Russian theme running through his work as a whole, from the earliest writings to Finnegans Wake. It discusses contacts and parallels between Joyce and three Russian figures: Bely, Nabokov and Eisenstein (and, more briefly, Pasternak). Thirdly, it details the Soviet reception of Joyce from 1922 until publication of the first Russian Ulysses in 1989, as well as surveying Marxist approaches to Joyce. A full bibliography of Russian and western sources is included.

In the title piece of this collection a party of guests wonder at the great comet which has appeared in the sky, and give their predictions of what this ill omen portends for the Earth. Mixing elements of the Gothic with fantasy, this piece marks the dawn of Russian science fiction, and constitutes a prime example of the creativity and imagination of Odoevsky's story-telling. Including the much-loved children's story 'The Little Town in the Snuffbox', the mysteries 'Imbroglio' and 'The Black Glove', and the artistic portrait 'Beethoven's Last Quartet', this volume of Odoevsky's short stories represents some of the finest of early-nineteenth-century Russian short fiction.

Odoyevsky’s cycle of short stories, "Pyostryye Skazki" (1833), is a transitional work between his writings of the 1820s (in particular his contributions to Mnemozina, 1824-5) and his mature period which culminated in "Russkiye Nochi" (1844). "Pyostryye Skazki" thus represents a romantic amalgam of elements drawn from fairy-tale and folklore, the fantastic and the society tale, serving didactic, satirical and whimsical purposes. The narration supposedly comes from an authorial alter ego, one Iriney Modestovich Gomozeyko, who occupies a place in Russian literature of the 1830s alongside Pushkin’s Ivan Petrovich Belkin and Gogol’s Rudyy Pan’ko. While individual stories from the cycle reappeared during the Soviet revival of interest in Odoyevsky, this edition, which includes an introduction, notes and a short bibliography, was the first integral (re)publication since 1833 of one of the basic texts of Russian Romanticism.

Vladimir Nabokov's extraordinary literary career, as a master of Russian and English prose, is unique. Acclaimed in the limited Russian emigre world, under the name of Sirin, Nabokov switched to writing in English and settled in America, a refugee from Hitler's Europe. Exile, memory, lost love and the magic of childhood are among his themes; stylistic and structural dexterity are his hallmarks; Lolita (ranked number 4 in the 1998 New York Modern Library list of 100 best novels of the century published in English) enabled him to retire to a final and productive period of European residence. Film versions of his most controversial novel keep Nabokov's name before the public, while almost his entire oeuvre remains currently available in paperback. Neil Cornwell's study, published for the Nabokov centenary, examines five of Nabokov's major novels, plus his short stories and critical writings, situating his work against the ever-expanding mass of VN scholarship, and noting his cultural debt to Russia, Europe, America and the British Isles.

On his travels through the wild mountainous terrain of the Caucasus, the narrator of A Hero of Our Time chances upon the veteran soldier and storyteller Maxim Maximych, who relates to him the dubious exploits of his former comrade Pechorin. Engaging in various acts of duelling, contraband, abduction and seduction, Pechorin, an archetypal Byronic anti-hero, combines cynicism and arrogance with melancholy and sensitivity. Causing an uproar in Russia when it was first published in 1840, Lermontov's brilliant, seminal study of contemporary society and the nihilistic aspect of Romanticism - accompanied here by the unfinished novel Princess Ligovskaya - remains compelling to this day.

Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien.
The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) - as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.

"The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales" contains eight stories which represent the best of Russian Romantic fiction from the first half of the 19th century. These include "The Salamander", "The Cosmorama", and "The Sylph", Odoevsky's three main metaphysical tales. The collection as a whole represents some of the best of the Russian Romantic fiction from the first half of the nineteenth century. This is the first English edition of Odoevsky's work to be published since 1965 and six of the tales are here translated for the first time.The selection, which coincides with the recent revival of interest in him as a leading exponent of Russian Romanticism, displays Odoevsky's Gogolian sense of humour and his interest in social issues as well as highlighting his philosophical approach, drawn from German Romanticism and a wealth of European sources, to themes of the Gothic and the fantastic. Stories of this title include: "New Year"; "The Tale of a Dead Body"; "Belonging to No One Knows Whom"; "The Story of a Cock, a Cat and a Frog"; "The Sylph"; "Letter IV [To Countess Ye. P. Rostopchina]"; "The Live Corpse"; "The Cosmorama"; and, "The Salamander".