Product Description
This series generally consists of two parts: 1) Providing a survey of the critical reception and context of the work and 2) Presenting the author's own close reading or commentary. A full bibliography is included. ... Read more

Product Description
Twelve superb tales by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Bunin, other masters. Excellent word-for-word English translations on facing pages. Also teaching and practice aids, Russian-English vocabulary, biographical/critical introductions to each selection, study questions, more. Especially helpful are the stress accents in the Russian text, usually found only in primers.
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Customer Reviews (15)

Dual Language Russion Book
This book was a gift for our son who is learning Russion.He was pleased with the classic selection of stories and the Russian and English translation on facing pages, which makes it very convenient to use.

It was a successful gift!

Great little book
I just received this little book last week, and it already is helping my Russian significantly. It is really awesome how the English and Russian texts line up side-by-side. It is laid out very well and the typography is nice. I do wish that there were more word hints, and that they were easier to access, i.e. placed at the bottom of the page rather than in endnotes. Overall, the translations are good and I think this will be a great way for me to improve my Russian vocabulary as well as read some really great literature.

Great learning tool
The stories are fun to read and since the English is right next to the Russian, it makes reading even more enjoyable and easy.

Very useful for studies of advanced English
I am a native Russian speaker and as an advanced learner of English I found this book amazingly useful. It spurs your curiosity to first read the original Russian text and then see how Prof. Struve goes about translating the endless archaisms and idiosyncrasies of the 19-th century Russian.

Kudos to Prof. Struve!

A fabulous language resource.Give me more books like this!
As a long time student of Russian, I have found it very difficult to lay hands on dual language books like this one.On the left page is the original Russian text, and on the right is a corresponding (and very well rendered) English translation.The true beauty of this volume, though, is that the modern translation provides a bridge to the literary style from the age of the masters like Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and my personal favorite, Gogol, among many others.An even dozen stories allow intermediate to advanced Russian speakers to deepen their familiarity with this particular subset of the language.I would love to have many more books like this one.Highly recommended. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A rather insightful book
The book is interesting, short, and easy to read.The author is an elegant thinker and clearly knows the subject matter very well. ... Read more

Product Description
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. The study begins with a consideration of Turgenev's masterpiece Fathers and Children and traces the evolution of the revolutionary novel through to its most important development a century later in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the emergence of a dissident literature in the Soviet Union. Professor Freeborn examines the particular phases of the genre's development, and in particular the development after 1917: the early fiction which explored the relationship between revolution and instinct, such as Pil'nyak's The Naked Year; the first attempts at mythmaking in Leonov's The Badgers and Furmanov's Chapayev; the next phase, in which novelists turned to the investigation of ideas, exemplified most notably by Zamyatin's We; the resumption of the classical approach in such works as Olesha's Envy, which explore the interaction between the individual and society. and finally the appearance of the revolutionary epic in Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin, Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don, and Alexey Tolstoy's The Road to Calvary. Professor Freeborn also examines the way this kind of novel has undergone change in response to revolutionary change; and he shows how an important feature of this process has been the implicit assumption that the revolutionary novel is distinguished by its right to pass an objective, independent judgement on revolution and the revolutionary image of man. This is a comprehensive and challenging study of a uniquely Russian tradition of writing, which draws on a great range of novels, many of them little-known in the West. As with other titles in this series all quotations have been translated. ... Read more

Product Description
"That science-fiction future in which technology would make everything very good—or very bad—has not yet arrived. From our vantage point at least, no age appears to have had a deeper faith in the inevitability and imminence of such a total technological transformation than the early twentieth century. Russia was no exception."—from the introduction

In the Soviet Union, it seems, armoring oneself against the world did not suffice—it was best to become metal itself. In his engaging and accessible book, Rolf Hellebust explores the aesthetic and ideological function of the metallization of the revolutionary body as revealed in Soviet literature, art, and politics. His book shows how the significance of this modern myth goes far beyond the immediate issue of the enthusiasm with which the Bolsheviks welcomed such a symbolic transfiguration and that of our own uneasy attraction to the images of metal flesh and machine-men. Hellebust’s literary examples range from the famous (Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago) to the forgotten (early Soviet proletarian poets). To these he adds a mix of non-Russian references, from creation myths to comic book superheroes, medieval alchemy to Moby-Dick. He includes readings of posters, sculpture, and political discourse as well as cross-cultural comparisons to revolutionary France, industrial-age America, and Nazi Germany. The result is a fascinating portrait of the ultimate symbols of dehumanizing modernity, as refracted through the prism of utopian humanism. ... Read more

Product Description
The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of a tradition that produced some of the most influential novels of the Western world. In newly-commissioned essays by prominent scholars, the work of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and many others is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading, and all quotations are in English. The volume will be invaluable for students, scholars and anyone interested in the Russian novel. ... Read more

Product Description
This first full-length account of the Russian verse tradition shows how certain formal features are associated with certain genres and specific themes. Keeping technical terms to a minimum and providing English translations of all quotations, Michael Wachtel offers close readings of poems by more than fifty poets from Pushkin to Brodsky, and demonstrates the practical interpretive value of paying attention to poetic form. Ultimately, his book is an inquiry into the nature of literary tradition in a country that has always taken much of its identity from its written legacy. ... Read more

Product Description

Introduction: Literature and the Political Problem

1. Since 1917: A Brief History

Soviet Literature
Persistence of the Past
Fellow Travelers
Proletarians
The Stalinists
Socialist Realism
The Thaw
The Sixties and Seventies

2. Mayakovsky and the Left Front of Art

The Suicide Note
Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy
The Cloud
"The Backbone Flute"
The Commune and the Left Front
The Bedbug and The Bath
Mayakovsky as a Monument
Poets of Different Camps

3. Prophets of a Brave New World

The Machine and England
Olesha's Critique of the Reason
Envy and Rage

4. The Intellectuals, I

Serapions
Boris Pilnyak: Biology and History

5. The Intellectuals, II

Isaac Babel: Horror in a Minor Key
Konstantin Fedin: The Confrontation with Europe
Leonov and Katayev
Conclusion

6. The Proletarians, I

The Proletcult
The Blacksmith Poets
Yury Libedinsky: Communists as Human Beings
Tarasov-Rodionov: "Our Own Wives, Our Own Children"
Dmitry Furmanov: An Earnest Commissar
A. S. Serafimovich: A Popular Saga

7. The Proletarians, II

Fyodor Gladkov: A Literary Autodidact
Alexander Fadeyev: The Search for a New Leo Tolstoy
Mikhail Sholokhov: The Don Cossacks
A Scatter of Minor Deities
Conclusion

8. The Critic Voronsky and the Pereval Group

Criticism and the Study of Literature
Voronsky
Pereval

9. The Levers of Control under Stalin

Resistance
The Purge
The Literary State

10. Zoshchenko and the Art of Satire

11. After Stalin: The First Two Thaws

Pomerantsev, Panova, and The Guests
Ilya Ehrenburg and Alexey Tolstoy
The Second Thaw
The Way of Pasternak

12. Into the Underground

The Literary Parties
The Trouble with Gosizdat: End of a Thaw
Buried Treasure: Platonov and Bulgakov
The Exodus into Samizdat and Tamizdat: Sinyavsky

13. Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps

One Day
The First Circle and The Cancer Ward
The Gulag
The Calf and the Oak: Dichtung and Wahrheit
Other Contributions to the Epic

14. The Surface Channel, I: The Village

15. The Surface Channel, II: Variety of Theme and Style

The City: Intelligentsia, Women, Workers
The Backwoods: Ethical Problems
Other New Voices of the Sixties and Seventies
World War II
Published Poets
A Final Word on Socialist Realism

16. Exiles, Early and Late

The Exile Experience
"Young Prose" and What Became of It
Religious Quest: Maximov and Ternovsky
Truth through Obscenity: Yuz Aleshkovsky
Transcendence and Tragedy: Erofeev's Trip
Poetry of the Daft: Sasha Sokolov
Perversion of Logic as Ideology: Alexander Zinoviev
A Gathering of Writers

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Customer Reviews (1)

a handbook of 20th cent. literature.
This book slides in and out of print but can usually be found in used stores or online.It begins with Mayakovsky and ends with Alexander Zinoviev and covers the best writers, official or dissident, over a period of 65 years in the Soviet Union.

Political context is the rope that ties all of these writers together from Isaac Babel's murder to Mikhail Bulgakov's silence to Andrei Sinyavsky's exile to young Eduard Limonov's poverty in America.What emerges is a picture of many of the riskiest and most experimental authors of the 20th century.For every western modernist like Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf or Pynchon, there was an equal talent in Russia, often going unnoticed.This is the conclusion I've drawn from the text and not the book's thesis.

Writers in this book may be categorized as the officially published like Yuri Trifinov and Leonid Leonov or outcasts like Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Nabokov but all are discussed for their artistic merit and their contribution as writers of and from Russia.It's not a quick narrative read but each chapter gives an introduction to severeal different writers including many who never made a big impact in translation.In short, this book inspires the reader to go out and find other books -- great books.I've owned my copy for a decade and still refer to it when I wish to look for an author that is new to me.

The only, slight fault with this book is that it ends in the 1980s, when it waqs first published, with the Soviet Union still intact.An update of writers who returned to Russia like Solzhenitsyn or Limonov would make a nice finale.So for a good book on that you have to read "The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature" by Deming Brown, not to be confused with this book's author. ... Read more

Product Description
Reference Guide to Russian Literature includes entries on more than 250 Russian writersand some 300 important works of Russian literature.
The Reference Guide to Russian Literature is introduced by survey articles, written by scholars in the field, that put the writers and works entries into the contexts of history and genre. Appendices include a general bibliography of anthologies and critical studies of Russian literature, followed by a Title Index. ... Read more

Product Description
In the new second volume of Brodsky Through The Eyes of His Contemporaries, the collection of interviews features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky's friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others.This collection of 40 interviews illuminates an intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene. Continuing the discussion begun in the first volume, this series of interviews contains important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. The interviews are published together with many unique photographs from the private archives of the author and the interviewees. ... Read more

Product Description
Learning Russian is an exciting challenge-even saying "hello" (____________) and "goodbye" (__ ________) seems daunting! Whether you're planning a trip to Russia or adding a valuable second language to your resume, this book is just what you need. Julia Stakhnevich, a native Russian speaker, will help you to:

• Recognize and read Cyrillic letters
• Pronounce Russian words like a native
• Ask for directions, order dinner, and conduct business
• Hold your own in a conversation

Julia Stakhnevich, Ph.D., was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. She received her doctorate from the University of Mississippi and teaches English, Linguistics, and Russian at Bridgewater State College. She is a member of the American Association of Applied Linguistics and the International Society for Language Study. She lives in Bridgewater, MA. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

One of the best introductory Russian grammar books I've read
I've been learning Russian for the past 6 months. It's been a difficult language to learn. I've basically been trying every resource I could find. I've found most Russian grammar books too BORING and poorly written to read. Normally I utilize audio courses more on this topic because in most audio courses, they do a better job of keeping it interesting and describing Russian grammar in a way that I can understand. My experience with books about Russian is that they're very wordy and tremendously BORING. Not with this book, however. This book is clear, concise and very interesting. Full of sensible charts and interesting facts about Russia, this book combines learning the Russian language with learning about Russian culture. Each chapter takes you further into the Russian language, while keeping you engaged with relevant scenarios in Russian culture (one chapter teaches you about Russian cuisine and how to order in Russian whilst teaching you how to keep your adjectives in forms that agree with the words they modify).

Unlike some introductory books, this book actually teaches you (simply) how to READ Russian characters. I had already learned how to read Russian before I bought this book, but this book pointed out certain spelling rules I hadn't learned yet that have really been improving my reading. I think this book is great for beginners and will be a great reference book as well. There are quizzes at the end of each chapter (and an answer key) which help you practice the language (even giving you opportunities to practice your grammar). Most basic books on Russian have quizzes at the end, but this is the first book I've actually been inclined to answer the quizzes. The book is written in such a way that I was actually interested enough to retain the knowledge I had read and I was able to answer the quizzes.

I would definitely recommend this book.

russian learning tool
very good book, very happy with book and its condition, i would buy here again

A good place to start
As a Russian specialist, I think that this is a good choice for those who want to try their hand at a difficult language.

no good
I am a linguist. I know languages and I know how to teach. This book is not a good choice if somebody wants to learn Russian.There are no exercises for practice either to speak or write in Russian. In each lesson you will find a lot of talk about Russian language without having an opportunity to learn it. The writer gives you a list of words and that's it. The so called dialogues consist of two phrases. There are no even short texts to read, no exercises to practice your skills. I would not recommend this textbook. I do not give a single star to rate this item.

The Everything Learning Russian Book
I think this is a great book and CD to learn Russian.It takes you step by step to learn the language.I give it five stars. ... Read more

Product Description
Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether, are presented here in his own words (in translation) and are discussed in the extensive Commentaries and Introduction. The texts range from 1910 to 1946 and are between two and ninety pages long. There are commentaries on all the texts, as well as a final essay on Pasternak s famous novel Doctor Zhivago, which is looked at here in the light of what it says on art and inspiration. Although universally acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Pasternak is not yet sufficiently recognized as the highly original and important thinker that he also was. All his life he thought and wrote about the nature and significance of the experience of inspiration, though avoiding the word inspiration where possible as his own views were not the conventional ones. The Marsh of Gold strives to make this philosophical aspect of his work better known, and to communicate to readers without Russian the pleasure and interest of an inspired life as Pasternak experienced it. ... Read more

Product Description
In Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both émigré literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources - from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and émigré literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova. ... Read more

Product Description
It was a movement so artfully anarchic, and so quickly suppressed, that readers only began to discover its strange and singular brilliance three decades after it was extinguished-and then only in samizdat and émigré publications. Some called it the last of the Russian avant-garde, and others called it the first (and last) instance of Absurdism in Russia; however difficult to classify, it was OBERIU (from an acronym standing for The Union of Real Art), and the pleasures of its poetry and prose are, with this volume, at long last fully open to English-speaking readers.

This anthology includes the work of three writers, Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Zabolotsky, who, between 1927 and 1930, made up the core of OBERIU, and of three others, Nikolai Oleinikov, Leonid Lipavsky, and Yakov Druskin, who, although not members of OBERIU, worked in the same vein. Skillfully translated to preserve the weird charm of the originals, these poems and prose pieces display all the hilarity and tragedy, the illogical action and puppetlike violence and eroticism, and the hallucinatory intensity that brought down the wrath of the Soviet censors. Today they offer an uncanny reflection of the distorted reality they reject. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

biased, but proud
The OBERIU anthology, put together with great care and sound scholarship by Eugene Ostashevsky, is an important publication, if only because much of the materials translated therein are published for the English reader for the very first time. As one of the co-translators of this anthology, I won't speak to the quality of the translations, though I think they are at least a sincere and valiant effort to bring into English a most complicated group of Russian writings from the early Soviet period.

Some important information about the anthology is missing from the general Amazon description:

First of all, the anthology is EDITED by Eugene Ostashevsky. But the authors of the works included in Northwestern Univ. Press's "OBERIU" Anthology are:
1. Daniil Kharms (poet, playwright, prose-miniaturist)
2. Alexander Vvedensky (considered the most radical poet of the group)
3. Nikolai Zabolotsky (poet)
4. Leonid Lipavsky (philosopher)
5. Nikolai Oleinikov (poet)
6. Iakov Druskin (philosopher, music theorist, theologian)

Some of the original members of the Oberiu group (founded in 1928) whose texts were not included in the anthology are:
1. the poet and revered prose-modernist Konstantin Vaginov
2. and the poet Igor Bakhterev (the youngest member of the group)

I hope this short comment will help those who are interested in the works of the so-called OBERIU writers (or Russian Absurdists as they are sometimes referred to), find out more about these audacious artists, unique thinkers, and innovative writers.

great teaching tool
I used this to introduce Russian absurdism to my creative writing class, and they loved it.The variety of styles here--poetry, play, prose, short-short, dialogue--make it great for teaching form, as well as introducing any literarure or creative class to the genre of Russian absurdism.The introduction, written by NYU Lit. professor Eugene Ostashevsky, is a very clear (but not dumbed down) explanation of the Oberiu movement, their purpose and place in Russian history--if, like me, you're not qualified to explain it to students yourself.Also, the selection and pieces here are great.The Kharms especially.I'd never read Alexander Vvedensky before and now he's one of my favorite writers.(Check out "A Certain Quantity of Conversations," which is a brilliant play, of sorts, in ten mini-acts). I'd rec. this book for anyone who's a writer (great for inspiration) or teacher.Or who just wants to read something different and hilarious.

Wonderous stuff
I must admit, I'm baffled by the lack of publicity for this extraordinary book. I mean, not a peep. So I've taken it upon myself to copy the following quotes from its back cover:

"OBERIU, sometimes called Russia's last avant-garde, is one of the most intriguing and little-known movements of the years before World War II. The absurdist poets at its center--Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Zabolotsky--belonged to the first generation of writers to come of age after the October Revolution and hence stand apart from their futurist predecessors. Less interested in coining neologisms than in `destroying the protocols of semantic coherence and linguistic realism,' these poets have produced a series of inventive, freewheeling, and often hilarious poetic texts in a variety of forms and genres. This anthology, the first large-scale English translation of OBERIU poetry, has been superbly edited and translated by the Russo-American poet Eugene Ostashevsky and hiscolleagues. In avant-garde annals, this is a milestone."--Marjorie Perloff

"The OBERIU writers are a revelation, an aspect of Russian modernism in the early Soviet period that has been largely invisible to readers in English, and these translations are brilliant, as nervy and funny and demotic as if the work were written in an inspired English in the first place."--Robert Hass

a profound disappointment
I wish I could impute a more positive rating, but I cannot find the wherewithal. The content of this putatively "absurdist" collection was such as my twin three-year-olds could readily pen without a moment's preparation. Noting that Kharms was among the authors represented, I expect to at least see something of the quality of his "The Old Woman," but I did not. It seemed as if the anthologists sought high and low for the poorest, leanest possible representation of every participating author. Vvesensky (yes, that's the proper spelling) was a waste of paper. I didn't even bother to delve into the other three or four "writers."

I assigned two stars because the typography was clean and the grammar of the translation was excellent. ... Read more