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Scholars have long been fascinated by the creative struggles with genre manifested throughout Dostoevsky's career. In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland brings historical context to bear, showing that Dostoevsky wanted to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting disintegration brought on by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s.

Offers the first book-length English-language study of Victor Pelevin, one of the most significant and popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet era. The text explores Pelevin's sustained Dostoevskian reflections on the philosophical question of freedom and his complex oeuvre and worldview.

Silence and the Rest argues that throughout its entire history, Russian poetry can be read as an argument for "verbal skepticism," positing a long-running dialogue between poets, philosophers, and theorists central to the antiverbal strain of Russian culture.

Explores the rich theme of the myth of Orpheus as master narrative for poetic inspiration and creative survival in the life and work of Marina Tsvetaeva. Olga Peters Hasty establishes the basic themes of the Orphic Complex and orders her arguments in the tragic shape of the Orpheus myth as it worked itself out organically in Tsvetaeva's own life.

Examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia's industrial revolution.

Argues that Dostoevsky and Nabokov affect the moral imagination of their readers by linking morally laden plots to the ethical questions raised by narrative fiction at the formal level. By doing so, they ask us to consider and respond to the ethical demands that narrative acts of representation and interpretation place on authors and readers.

Members of the Soviet Writers' Union were rewarded with elite status and luxuries. This book argues that Stalin chose union leaders, such as Maxim Gorky and Alexandr Fadeyev, whose psychologies he could exploit, and ensured their loyalty with rewards but also with a philosophical argument to assure that one was not trading ethics for self interest.

Traces Dostoevsky's indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that he wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels.

Studies how women who write poems were invented in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia by women poets themselves, readers who derived poets of their own design from women's poems, and male poets who fabricated women and wrote poems on their behalf.

Examines idealized relationships between women in Russian literature and culture. The book reveals how the idea of a community of women originates in the classic Russian novel, fuels mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and assumes a place of privilege in Stalinist culture.

In the broadest sense, this volume offers a fresh evaluation of Tolstoy's program to reform the ways we live, work, commune with nature and art, practice spirituality, exchange ideas and knowledge, become educated, and speak and think about history and social change.

Unorthodox Beauty shows how Russian poets of the early twentieth century consciously adapted Russian Orthodox culture in order to create a distinctly religious modernism. Martha M. F. Kelly contends that, beyond mere themes, these writers developed an entire poetics that drew on liturgical tradition.

The first major study in English of Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852)--poet, transla-tor of German romantic verse, and mentor of Pushkin--this book brings overdue attention to an important figure in Russian literary and cultural history.

Expanding on the classical triad of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, the author guides us through Dostoevsky's most difficult paradoxes: goodness that begets evil, beautiful personalities that bring about grief, and criminality that brings about salvation. Do

Presents an introduction to Sergei Dovlatov (1941-90) that is closely attentive to the details of his life and work, their place in the history of Soviet society and literature, and of emigre culture during this turbulent period.

The defining quality of Russian literature, for most critics, is its ethical seriousness expressed through formal originality. This title addresses this characteristic through the thought of the Lithuanianborn Franco-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

This is a study of Mikhail Lermontov that attempts to integrate in-depth interpretations of his major texts. It considers his narrative poems, a play, and novel from the perspective of one of the central concerns of Romanticism in general and of Lermontov in particular: heroism and individualism.

A poet, critic and theoretician at the turn of the 20th century, Viacheslav Ivanov was dubbed ""Viacheslav the Magnificent"" by his contemporaries. This volume of essays covers a broad range of Ivanov's interests including the aesthetics of Symbolism, theatre and culturological concerns.

In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs.

While Dostoevsky's relation to religion is well-trod ground, there exists no comprehensive study of Dostoevsky and Catholicism. Elizabeth Blake's ambitious and learned Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground fills this glaring omission in the scholarship.

This provocative work takes issue with the idea that Socialist Realism was mainly the creation of party leaders and was imposed from above on the literati who lived and worked under the Soviet regime.

Offers a new approach to the Russian avant-garde. It argues that central writers, artists, and theorists of the avant-garde self-consciously used an infantile aesthetic, as inspired by children's art, language, perspective, and logic, to accomplish the artistic renewal they were seeking in literature, theory, and art.

Sots-art, the mock use of the Soviet ideological cliches of mass culture, originated in Soviet nonconformist art of the early 1970s. This text examines literary Sots-art on several levels.