Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers

Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers
Author: Darya Protopopova
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527527824

Virginia Woolf always stayed ahead of her time. Championing gender equality when women could not vote; publishing authors from Pakistan, France, Austria and other parts of the world, while nationalism in Britain was on the rise; and befriending outcasts and social pariahs. As such, what could have possibly interested her in the works of nineteenth-century Russian writers, austere and, at times, misogynistic thinkers preoccupied with peasants, priests, and paroxysms of the soul? This study explains the chronological and cultural paradox of how classic Russian fiction became crucial to Woolf’s vision of British modernism. We follow Woolf as she begins to learn Russian, invents a character for a story by Dostoevsky, ponders over Sophia Tolstoy’s suicide note, and proclaims Chekhov a truly ‘modern’ writer. The book also examines British modernists’ fascination with Russian art, looking at parallels between Roger Fry’s articles on Russian Post-Impressionists and Woolf’s essays on Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.

Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View

Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View
Author: R. Rubenstein
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2009-09-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230100554

This book brings together Virginia Woolf's essays and book reviews on Russian literature; her unpublished reading notes on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev; and new and insightful scholarly commentary concerning her response to each of the major Russian writers.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf
Author: Viviane Forrester
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780231153577

Winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt award for biography, this remarkable portrait sheds new light on Virginia Woolf's relationships with her family and friends and how they shaped her work. Forrester weaves a colorful, intense drama that forces readers to rethink their understanding of Woolf, her writing, and her world.

Love and Russian Literature

Love and Russian Literature
Author: Ira B. Nadel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350115037

Russia haunted the British cultural imagination throughout the 20th century – whether as a romantic source of literary and political inspiration or as a warning of creeping totalitarianism. In this new book, Ira Nadel, charts the story of that influence through the work of some of the key figures in British literature across the century, including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells. Framed by the story of two romantic encounters, between Walter Benjamin and the actress Asja Lacis in Moscow in 1926 and between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova in 1945, Love and Russian Literature casts a vivid new light on the ways in which responses to Russia shaped the history of British modernism.

Books and Portraits

Books and Portraits
Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher:
Total Pages: 253
Release: 1977
Genre: Authors, English
ISBN: 9780586047996

Forty-five previously uncollected literary sketches, reviews, and profiles by the distinguished modern English novelist include writings on women and women authors, Russian literature, and such Americans as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville.

What Isn't Remembered

What Isn't Remembered
Author: Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496229223

Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn't Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves--a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner. A young man longs for his mother's love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother's affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong feud between the two. A divorced man struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage and his family's genocidal past while trying to persuade his father to start cancer treatments. A high school girl feels responsible for the death of her best friend, and the guilt continues to haunt her decades later. Evocative and lyrical, the tales in What Isn't Remembered uncover complex events and emotions, as well as the unpredictable ways in which people adapt to what happens in their lives, finding solace from the most surprising and unexpected sources.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf
Author: Ruth Gruber
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1453248641

This groundbreaking study of the work and legacy of Virginia Woolf is also an account of the intertwined lives of two extraordinary women. In 1932, Ruth Gruber earned her PhD—the youngest person ever to do so—with a stunning doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Published in 1935, the paper was the first-ever feminist critique of Woolf’s work and inspired a series of correspondences between the two writers. It also led to Gruber’s eventual meeting with Woolf, which she recounted six decades later in Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman. Described by Gruber as “the odyssey of how I met Virginia Woolf, and how her life and work became intertwined with my life,” Virginia Woolf is a clear and insightful portrait of one of modern literature’s most innovative authors, written by one of America’s most remarkable journalists.

Anti-Portraits: Poetics of the Face in Modern English, Polish and Russian Literature (1835-1965)

Anti-Portraits: Poetics of the Face in Modern English, Polish and Russian Literature (1835-1965)
Author: Kamila Pawlikowska
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004302263

Anti-Portraits: Poetics of the Face in Modern English, Polish and Russian Literature (1835-1965) is a study of a-physiognomic descriptions of the face. It demonstrates that writers such as George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, Nicolay Gogol, Virginia Woolf and Witold Gombrowicz vigorously resisted the belief that facial features reflect character. While other studies tend to focus on descriptions which affirm physiognomy, this book examines portraits which question popular face-reading systems and contravene their common premise – the surface-depth principle. Such portraits reveal that physiognomic formula is a cultural construct, invented to abridge, organise and regulate legibility of the human face. Most importantly, strange and ‘unreadable’ fictional faces frequently expose the connection between physiognomic judgement and stereotyping, prejudice and racism.

Moments of Being

Moments of Being
Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1985
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780156619189

Published years after her death, Moments of Being is Virginia Woolf's only autobiographical writing, considered by many to be her most important book. A collection of five memoir pieces written for different audiences spanning almost four decades, Moments of Being reveals the remarkable unity of Virginia Woolf's art, thought, and sensibility. "Reminiscences," written during her apprenticeship period, exposes the childhood shared by Woolf and her sister, Vanessa, while "A sketch of the Past" illuminates the relationship with her father, Leslie Stephens, who played a crucial role in her development as an individual a writer. Of the final three pieces, composed for the Memoir Club, which required absolute candor of its members, two show Woolf at the threshold of artistic maturity and one shows a confident writer poking fun at her own foibles.

On Not Knowing Greek

On Not Knowing Greek
Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Hesperus Press
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2024-07-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1843913488

Taken from The Common Reader, these essays take the form of a series of reflections on diverse literary topics, brought to life by Woolf' s extensive knowledge, lively wit, and piercing insight. "For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition."