Derzhavin

Derzhavin
Author: Vladislav Khodasevich
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2007-12-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0299224236

Russian poet, soldier, and statesman Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) lived during an epoch of momentous change in Russia—imperial expansion, peasant revolts, war with Turkey, and struggle with Napoleon—and he served three tsars, including Catherine the Great. Here in its first English translation is the masterful biography of Derzhavin by another acclaimed Russian man of letters, Vladislav Khodasevich. Derzhavin occupied a position at the center of Russian life, uniting civic service with poetic inspiration and creating an oeuvre that at its essence celebrated the triumphs of Russia and its rulers, particularly Catherine the Great. His biographer Khodasevich, by contrast, left Russia in 1922, unable to abide the increasingly repressive regime of the Soviets. For Khodasevich, whose lyric poems were as commonplace in their focus as Derzhavin’s odes were grand, this biography was in a sense a rediscovery of a lost and idyllic era, a period when it was possible to aspire to the pinnacles of artistic achievement while still occupying a central role in Russian society. Khodasevich writes with humor, intelligence, and understanding, and his work stands as a monument to the last three centuries of Russian history, lending keen insight into Russia’s past as well as its present and future. “Khodasevich’s light narrative touch (as translated by Brintlinger) lends a novelistic quality to the biography, making it a genuine tour de force. All students and scholars – of history, literature, poetry, biography – will find something of interest here.”—Choice

Iurii Dombrovskii

Iurii Dombrovskii
Author: Peter Doyle
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789057026249

Conscience is the writer's production tool. If he has not got that, he has not got anything. All the artistic fabric crumbles and frays at the first touch.- Iurii Dombrovskii Iurii Dombrovskii (1909-1978) was a Soviet writer of immense courage and integrity, whose life and literary career were repeatedly disrupted by unjust arrests and long periods of imprisonment. Born and educated in Moscow, he was first detained in 1932, and spent a total of twenty-three years in exile in Alma-Alata and in Siberian labour camps. Even after his rehabilitation in 1956 he was never free from surveillance and harassment by Soviet authorities. Only able to publish infrequently, he was forced to eke out a meagre existence yet produced original works of high quality. This book is the first full-length monograph on Iurii Dombrovskii, widely acclaimed in recent years as a writer of major importance and interest, following the publication in Russia and the West of his last novel The Faculty of Unnecessary Things. The book is based on a thorough study of published materials by and about Dombrovskii and on research into unpublished archive sources, to which no previous Western scholar has had access. Iurii Dombrovskii: Freedom under Totalitarianismprovides a detailed overview of the writer, and lays the foundations for further research. Peter Doyle gives the most substantive account of Dombrovkii's biography yet written, along with detailed interpretive studies of his main prose works, an assessment of his little known poetry, and a comprehensive bibliography.The Faculty of Unnecessary Things. The book is based on a thorough study of published materials by and about Dombrovskii and on research into unpublished archive sources, to which no previous Western scholar has had access. Iurii Dombrovskii: Freedom under Totalitarianismprovides a detailed overview of the writer, and lays the foundations for further research. Peter Doyle gives the most substantive account of Dombrovkii's biography yet written, along with detailed interpretive studies of his main prose works, an assessment of his little known poetry, and a comprehensive bibliography.

Realizing Metaphors

Realizing Metaphors
Author: David M. Bethea
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1998-11-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0299159736

Readers often have regarded with curiosity the creative life of the poet. In this passionate and authoritative new study, David Bethea illustrates the relation between the art and life of nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin, the central figure in Russian thought and culture. Bethea shows how Pushkin, on the eve of his two-hundredth birthday, still speaks to our time. He indicates how we as modern readers might "realize"— that is, not only grasp cognitively, but feel, experience—the promethean metaphors central to the poet's intensely "sculpted" life. The Pushkin who emerges from Bethea's portrait is one who, long unknown to English-language readers, closely resembles the original both psychologically and artistically. Bethea begins by addressing the influential thinkers Freud, Bloom, Jakobson, and Lotman to show that their premises do not, by themselves, adequately account for Pushkin's psychology of creation or his version of the "life of the poet." He then proposes his own versatile model of reading, and goes on to sketches the tangled connections between Pushkin and his great compatriot, the eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin. Pushkin simultaneously advanced toward and retreated from the shadow of his predecessor as he created notions of poet-in-history and inspiration new for his time and absolutely determinative for the tradition thereafter.

Russian Subjects

Russian Subjects
Author: Monika Greenleaf
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780810115255

This collection of essays resituates poetic works by Derzhavin, Krylov, Batisushkov, Pushkin, Girboedov, Lermontov, Baratynsky and Pavlova, within the force fields of contradicoty cultural pressures, as are the once best-selling prose narratives of Narezhnyi, Karamzin, Viazemsky and others.

The First Epoch

The First Epoch
Author: Luba Golburt
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2014-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299298140

In the shadow of Pushkin's Golden Age, Russia's eighteenth-century culture was relegated to an obscurity hardly befitting its actually radical legacy. Why did nineteenth-century Russians put the eighteenth century so quickly behind them? How does a meaningful present become a seemingly meaningless past? Interpreting texts by Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Pushkin, Viazemsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others, Luba Golburt finds surprising answers.

Reference Guide to Russian Literature

Reference Guide to Russian Literature
Author: Neil Cornwell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1020
Release: 2013-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134260776

First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.

Verses and Versions

Verses and Versions
Author: Brian Boyd
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2008
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780151012640

Vladimir Nabokov was hailed by Salman Rushdie as the most important writer ever to cross the boundary between one language and another. A Russian emigre who began writing in English after his forties, Nabokov was a trilingual author, equally competent in Russian, English, and French. A gifted and tireless translator, he bridged the gap between languages nimbly and joyously. Here, collected for the first time in one volume as Nabokov always wished, are many of his English translations of Russian verse, presented next to the Russian originals. Here, also, are some of his notes on the dangers and thrills of translation. With an introduction by Brian Boyd, author of "Vladimir Nabokov, "a prize-winning two-volume biography," ""Verses and Versions" is a momentous and authoritative contribution to Nabokov's literary legacy.

The Imperial Sublime

The Imperial Sublime
Author: Harsha Ram
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2006-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780299181949

The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme simultaneous with the evolution of Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840—the century during which poets defined the main questions facing Russian literature and society. Harsha Ram shows how imperial ideology became implicated in an unexpectedly wide range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style, and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and the ruling monarch.

Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment

Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment
Author: Gary M. Hamburg
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 913
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300113137

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- ONE: Searching for Enlightenment -- PART I: Wisdom and Wickedness, 1500-1689 -- TWO: God and Politics in Muscovy -- THREE: A Question of Legitimacy -- FOUR: Visions of the State at Mid-Century -- FIVE: Church and Politics in Late Muscovy -- PART II: Ways of Virtue, 1689-1762 -- SIX: Church, State, and Society under Peter -- SEVEN: Virtue and Politics after Peter -- PART III: Straining toward Light, 1762-1801 -- EIGHT: Catherine II and Enlightenment -- NINE: Nikita Panin and Imperial Power

An Indwelling Voice

An Indwelling Voice
Author: Stuart Goldberg
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2023-10-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1487544561

How have poets in recent centuries been able to inscribe recognizable and relatively sincere voices despite the wearing of poetic language and reader awareness of sincerity’s pitfalls? How are readers able to recognize sincerity at all given the mutability of sincere voices and the unavailability of inner worlds? What do disagreements about the sincerity of texts and authors tell us about competing conceptualizations of sincerity? And how has sincere expression in one particular, illustrative context – Russian poetry – both changed and remained constant? An Indwelling Voice grapples, uniquely, with such questions. In case studies ranging from the late neoclassical period to post-postmodernism, it explores how Russian poets have generated the pragmatic framings and poetic devices that allow them to inscribe sincere voices in their poetry. Engaging Anglo-American and European literature, as well as providing close readings of Russian poetry, An Indwelling Voice helps us understand how poets have at times generated a powerful sense of presence, intimating that they speak through the poem.