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The idea of man as an essentially irrational being has preoccupied some of the most influential of Russian thinkers, including the three important Soviet writers considered by Dr Edwards in this book.

A serious and detailed study of modern Russian poetry aimed at readers with little or no Russian.

Audrey Bely was one of the most innovative prose writers in Russian in the twentieth century. This book traces the development of his technique as a novelist from the early experimental Symphonies (1902-8) to the last novel, Masks, published in 1932. In the first two chapters of the book, Dr Elsworth explores Bely's theoretical writings on the aesthetic theory of Symbolism, and his association, after 1912, with the doctrines of Rudolf Steiner. Bely regarded art as an active force for the transformation of the human personality and the resolution of the crisis that he diagnosed in the culture of his time. Both the subject matter and the stylistic peculiarities of his novels have their origin in this particular philosophy of culture, and it is in this context that the novels are examined in the second half of the book. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in Bely and the wider subject of Russian Symbolist doctrine and practice.

This book was the first full-length interpretative study in English of the later writings of the outstanding Soviet novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). The focus is the 1930s, the period when Bulgakov was writing The Master and Margarita, an extraordinary novel which has had a profound impact in the Soviet Union and which is now generally regarded as his masterpiece.

Professor Peace argues that Gogol has, as a writer, close affinities with the Russian Middle Ages and that his ambiguous position in the great humanist tradition of nineteenth-century Russian literature springs from his attempts to come to terms with the cultural impact of Sentimentalism, and its later development Romanticism.

This book, which draws extensively on unpublished archival materials and other contemporary sources, aims to show that in certain important respects Wagner's music and ideas found more fertile ground in Russia than anywhere else in Europe.

This 1999 book explores the Russian verse tradition from Pushkin to Brodsky. Keeping technical terms to a minimum and providing English translations of Russian quotations, Michael Wachtel offers close readings of poems by more than fifty poets, and demonstrates the practical interpretive value of paying attention to poetic form.

Originally published in 1981, this book is an examination of the politics of literary publishing in the Soviet Union, and in particular during the period after Stalin's death, in the 1950s. Dr Frankel focuses on the leading literary journal of the 1950s, Novy Mir, between whose covers so much important literary work first appeared.

Petrushka, the Russian equivalent of Punch and Judy, was one of the most popular spectacles at fairgrounds and in city courtyards for over a century. Catriona Kelly's study, the first to appear in English, traces the history of Petrushka, illustrating how it reflected the tensions of Russian urban life both before and after the Revolution.

A provocative and stimulating revaluation of Nabokov that will interest any serious student of twentieth-century literature.

Dr Scatton explores the critical and political reception of a complex artist in a society where the purpose of art was to serve the state. Her book sheds new light on questions of literary politics in totalitarian societies, as well as bringing English-speaking readers a taste of a most original writer.

This comprehensive examination of Turgenev's fiction challenges traditional assumptions of both Eastern and Western critics. It focuses principally on the complexity and subtlety of Turgenev's portrayal of the psychology of his characters. The book is designed to be accessible not only to Slavists, but to other literary scholars.

Pamela Davidson explores Ivanov's poetic method, relating his art to his central beliefs and considering the ways in which he attempted to embody these ideas in his own life. She focuses on Ivanov's interpretation of Dante and in so doing, opens up fresh perspectives on the wider question of Russia's relation to the Western cultural tradition and Catholicism.

This book is a major critical biography of the poet Maria Tsvetaeva by one of the foremost authorities on her work. It draws on a profusion of recent documentation and research, some of it hitherto unpublished, and encompasses the whole course of her life.

This book studies the work of five Russian liberal thinkers who were active in the period 1840-60 against the general background of Russian history, literature and thought in that period. All five thinkers played an important part in the flowering of Russian letters in the 1840s, and were involved in the attempt of the intelligentsia.

Diane Thompson's study focuses on the meaning and poetic function of memory in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and seeks to show how Dostoevsky used cultural memory to create a synthesis between his Christian ideal and art. Memory is considered not only as a theme or subject, but also as a principle of artistic composition.

This book is a Western study of Novikov's complete career and it shows how he responded to Catherine's enlightened despotism in cultural matters and why their ways eventually parted. Novikov is viewed here not only as a founding father of the Russian intelligentsia, but as a representative of the general European Enlightenment.

This is a comprehensive study of a group of avant-garde Soviet writers who styled themselves OBERIU, 'The Association for Real Art'. Graham Roberts examines the work of OBERIU members in relation to the theories of formalists and the Bakhtin circle, and the wider movements of modernism and postmodernism.

The first book to provide a synthesising study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of empire-building.

This is a 1992 study in English of Andrei Platonov, a writer who belongs to a Russian philosophical tradition that includes Solov'ev, Bakhtin and Pasternak. The book investigates the interrelation of themes, imagery and the use of language in his prose.

Iurii Trifonov (1925-81) has recently become well known in the West as a writer of Soviet urban life. This study, first published in 1993, concentrates on his exploration of major events in Russian history and their implications and consequences for his time.

Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-1958) was one of the great poets of twentieth-century Russia. As the last link in the Russian Futurist tradition and the first poet to come of age in the Soviet period, Zabolotsky wrote both experimental and classical poetry. This book, first published in 1994, was the first critical biography of Zabolotsky to appear in English.

Karamzin was the foremost Russian representative of the late eighteenth-century Sentimentalist literature. In this study, Gitta Hammarberg makes use of advances in literary theory (particularly Bakhtin-school theory) in order to develop a theory of Sentimentalist literature. She applies this to Karamzin's prose fiction, paying particular attention to the role of the author-reader.

Professor Freeborn's book is an attempt to identify and define the evolution of a particular kind of novel in Russian and Soviet literature: the revolutionary novel. This genre is a uniquely Russian phenomenon and one that is of central importance in Russian literature.

This is a 1996 study of the extraordinary diversity and range of satirical writing in Russian literature. Through the close analysis of seminal satirical texts written by five Russian and emigre authors in the 1970s and 1980s, Karen Ryan-Hayes demonstrates that formal and thematic parody is pervasive.

This is the first full-length study of the huge cultural impact of fortune-telling in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present. It discusses the links between urban fortune-telling and traditional oral culture the particular role of women, and discusses why fortune-telling is still a powerful force in Russian.

This book interprets the complex of meanings attached by Russian culture to the concept of everyday life, or byt, and assesses its impact on Russian modernist narrative. Drawing on modern literary theory and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings offers provocative, yet careful, readings of key narrative texts from the period.

This study shows how four famous Jews writing in Russian in the early Soviet period attempted to resolve the conflict between their cultural identity and their place in Revolutionary Russia. Babel, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Ehrenburg struggled to form creative selves out of the contradictions of origins, outlook, and social or ideological pressures.

This1998 book is a study of the Russian reception of English literature from Romanticism to aestheticism focuses particularly on the reception by Russian poets of Shelley, Ruskin, Pater, Frazer and Wilde, which gave new impetus to the Russian imagination at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth century.

This book is an original and detailed attempt to re-examine Dostoyevsky the artist.