New York: Vintage books, 1970. — 786 p. A dense but richly rewarding cultural history of Russia. What is especially impressive is that in this book, which was published in 1966--25 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union - Billington makes a persuasive case that the Communists will eventually lose their grip and fall from power because of deep-seated internal historical...
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2007. — 304 p. The problem of madness has preoccupied Russian thinkers since the beginning of Russia's troubled history and has been dealt with repeatedly in literature, art, film, and opera, as well as medical, political, and philosophical essays. Madness has been treated not only as a medical or psychological matter,...
Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. — 264 p. One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin’s studio. Tolstoy’s criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude...
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. — 357 p. — ISBN10: 0299318303, 13 978-0299318307. Throughout its modern history, Russia has seen a succession of highly performative social acts that play out prominently in the public sphere. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into dialog for the first time and shows that performance is a...
Linkoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. — 246 p. — ISBN10: 0803215479; ISBN13: 978-0803215474. As World War I shaped and molded European culture to an unprecedented degree, it also had a profound influence on the politics and aesthetics of early-twentieth-century Russian culture. In this provocative and fascinating work, Aaron J. Cohen shows how World War I changed Russian...
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2012. — xvi + 330 p. — ISBN: 978-1-909254-11-4, ISBN: 978-1-909254-10-7, ISBN: 978-1-909254-12-1, ISBN: 978-1-909254-13-8, ISBN: 978-1-909254-14-5. Described by the sixteenth-century English poet George Turbervile as "a people passing rude, to vices vile inclin’d", the Russians waited some three centuries before their subsequent cultural...
Picador, 2018 (2003). — 696 (HQ/True) p. — ISBN: 0713995173, 0805057838. From the award-winning author of The Whisperers, Orlando Figes Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia is a dazzling history of Russia's mighty culture. Orlando Figes' enthralling, richly evocative history has been heralded as a literary masterpiece on Russia, the lives of those who have shaped its...
Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus, 2004. — 355 p. — ISBN: 90 6143 292. The study discusses how the materiality of writing – the text as image – is generating meaning. In this, the concept of faktura – central to the early Russian avant-garde theories of art and poetry – encompasses the materiality of painting/mark and the composition of paint/marks on the canvas/page. It is,...
Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet. 2014. 196 p. ISBN: 978-91-554-9064-5 The volume consists of seven articles by scholars from Italy, Sweden, the UK and the USA, and is devoted to the subject that has primarily been familiar in the West through Stalin’s Gulag. Back then, as a bitter joke had it, Russians could be divided into three categories: those who were imprisoned, those who...
Academic Studies Press, 2018. — 240 P. Imperial Russia’s large wolf populations were demonized, persecuted, tormented, and sometimes admired. That Savage Gaze explores the significance of wolves in pre-revolutionary Russia utilizing the perspectives of cultural studies, ecocriticism, and human-animal studies. It examines the ways in which hunters, writers, conservationists,...
Academic Studies Press, 2017. — 260 p. Postmodern Crises collects previously published and yet unpublished Mark Lipovetsky’s articles on Russian literature and film. Written in different years, they focus on cultural and aesthetic crises that, taken together, constitute the postmodern condition of Russian culture. The reader will find here articles about classic subversive...
The Great Courses, 2018. — 245 p. Russia’s global importance is undeniable. After a brief period of decline after the Soviet Union dissolved, the Russian state has reemerged in the 21st century with a geopolitical influence that rivals some of its most significant eras. Yet for as much as Russia demands the attention of Western policy makers, there remains uncertainty about...
Routledge, 2006. — xii, 162 p. — (Central Asian Studies). — ISBN13: 978–0–203–47934–6. Recent political changes in Central Asia, where the United States is replacing Russia as the dominant power, are having a profound effect on Russian speakers in the region. These people, formerly perceived as progressive and engaging with Europe, are now confronted by the erasure of their...
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. — 300 p. — ISBN10: 0804722889; ISBN13: 978-0804722889. This book analyzes the modernist aesthetic utopia, advancing two arguments concerning the historical evolution of the Russian literary and cultural tradition: that modernism, ostensibly reacting against positivism and realism, assimilated some of the fundamental principles of its...
Stockholm: Stockholms universitet. 2009. 326 p. ISBN: 978-91-86071-30-1 What happens when the Russian Orthodox tradition meets post-Soviet Russia? This is the general question which will be in the focus of this study of the Orthodox discourse in post-Soviet Russian culture. It will be analyzed both in its own right and as a constituent of memory, a conservative or imperialist...
Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John BenjaminS Publishing Company, 1993. — 267 p. — ISBN: 90-272-1534-0. The era of Russian Symbolism (1892-1917) has been called the Silver Age of Russian culture, and even the Second Golden Age. Symbolist authors are among the greatest Russian authors of this century, and their activities helped to foster one of the most significant advances in...
Oxford University Press, 2019. — 360 p. When so much in Russia has changed, the banya remains. For over one thousand years Russians of every economic class, political party, and social strata have treated bathing as a communal activity integrating personal hygiene and public health with rituals, relaxation, conversations, drinking, political intrigue, business, and sex....
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. — 352 p. — ISBN10: 0299229505; ISBN13: 978-0299229504. Though the Russian Symbolist movement was dominated by a concern with transcending sex, many of the writers associated with the movement exhibited an intense preoccupation with matters of the flesh. Drawing on poetry, plays, short stories, essays, memoirs, and letters, as well...
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. — 343 p. — (New Directions in Book History) — ISBN10: 3319507079; ISBN13: 978-3319507071 This book takes up the obtrusive problem of visual representation of fiction in contemporary Russian book design. By analyzing a broad variety of book covers, the study offers an absolutely unique material that illustrates a radically changing notion of...
New York; London: NYU Press, 1995. — 330 p. Russian history, religion, folklore, and literature are rife with suffering. The plight of Anna Karenina, the submissiveness of serfs in the 16th and 17th centuries, ancient religious tracts emphasizing humility as “the mother of virtues,” and the current economic upheavals wracking the country are a few symptoms of what The Slave...
Routledge, 2009. — 296 p. Tobacco in Russian History and Culture explores tobacco’s role in Russian culture through a multidisciplinary approach starting with the growth of tobacco consumption from its first introduction in the seventeenth century until its pandemic status in the current post-Soviet health crisis. The essays as a group emphasize the ways in which, from earliest...
Boston [Brighton], MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010. — 558 p. — ISBN: 978-1-934843-79-6. Holy Russia, Sacred Israel examines how Russian religious thinkers, both Jewish and Christian, conceived of Judaism, Jewry and the ‘Old Testament’ philosophically, theologically, and personally at a time when the Messianic element in Russian consciousness was being stimulated by events...
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. — 256 p. — ISBN10: 0822943166; ISBN13: 978-0822943167. The “Silver Age” (c. 1890-1917) has been one of the most intensely studied topics in Russian literary studies, and for years scholars have been struggling with its precise definition. Firmly established in the Russian cultural psyche, it continues to influence both...
Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1984. — 292 s. Wstęp. Na progu stulecia. Ku Europie. Poza dworem. W dobie przewrótow. Aspiracje wladczyni. Niespełnione nadzieje. Przypisy. Indeks nazwisk. Spis ilustracji.
Cambridge University Press, 2005. - 260 p. - ISBN: 0-521-83926-2 What is Russia? Who are Russians? What is “Russianness”? The question of national identity has long been a vexed one in Russia, and is particularly pertinent in the post-Soviet period. For a thousand years, these questions have been central to the work of Russian writers, artists, musicians, film-makers, critics,...
Indiana University Press, 2007. — 434 p. — (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies). Sacred Stories brings together the work of leading scholars writing on the history of religion and religiosity in late imperial Russia during the critical decades preceding the 1917 revolutions. Embodying new research and new methodologies, this book reshapes our...
London: Routledge, 2016. — 314 p. — ISBN13: 978-1138951983 — (Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series) Among the many successes of the Soviet Union were inaugural space flight — ahead of the United States — and many other triumphs related to aviation. Aviators and cosmonauts enjoyed heroic status in the Soviet Union, and provided supports of the Soviet project...
Routledge, 2018. — 340 p. This book brings together scholars from across a variety of disciplines who use different methodologies to interrogate the changing nature of Russian culture in the twenty-first century. The book considers a wide range of cultural forms that have been instrumental in globalizing Russia. These include literature, art, music, film, media, the internet,...
Basingtoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2013 — 184 p. — ISBN10: 113733827X; ISBN13: 978-1137338273. In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, mysticism, anti-Semitism, and mathematical theory fused into a distinctive intellectual movement. Through analyses of such seemingly disparate subjects as Moscow mathematical circles and the 1913 novel Petersburg, this book illuminates a...
University of California Press, 2002. — 346 p. This is the most comprehensive study available of the popular theater that developed during the last decades of tsarist Russia. Swift examines the origins and significance of the new "people's theaters" that were created for the lower classes in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1861 and 1917. His extensively researched study, full...
Brill, 2016. — XX+541 p. — 9789004311114. — (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 61). Russia is an enigmatic, mysterious country, situated between East and West not only spatially, but also mentally. Or so it is traditionally perceived in Western Europe and the Anglophone world at large. One of the distinctive features of Russian culture is its irrationalism, which...
Translated from Russian by Marcus C. Levitt, David Bugden, and Liv Bliss. Edited by Marcus C. Levitt. Boston [Brighton], MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012. — vi + 273 p. — (Ars Rossica). — ISBN: 978-1-936235-49-0; ISBN: 978-1-61811-124-1. Featuring a number of distinguished essays by internationally known Russian cultural historians Boris Uspenskij (Boris Andreevich Uspensky,...
New York: Pantheon Books. 1957. — 287 p. — (Vol. 1) / 282 p. (Vol 2). This book is addressed to those who love mushrooms, who love the whole rich world of wild mushrooms in the same way that many love the flowers of the field and the birds of the air. Our public is certainly one of the smallest in the English-speaking world, but no matter. We invite all to share our joys, and...
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