Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Rethinking The Canon: Nonconformist Soviet Classics In Post-Soviet Perspective, Alexander Zholkovsky

Russian Culture

In the four-plus decades since Stalin's death, the Soviet literary canon has undergone a series of changes. Thus, Fedor Dostoyevsky, Konstantin Leontiev, and Apollon Grigoriev, seen in all their complexity, gradually resumed their pride of place in nineteenth-century literary history, while Gogol was allowed to be more of a conservative thinker and modernist stylist than during the period of High Stalinism. Twentieth-century literature welcomed back the early Vladimir Maiakovsky, then all of Aleksandr Blok (previously represented in the Soviet canon only by his The Twelve), and finally the entire Silver Age. The list of writers now rehabilitated, republished, and "recognized" …

Russian Literature In The Christian Context, Boris Paramonov

Russian Culture

In examining Russia’s cultural history one encounters an incontestable fact: the literary nature of its spirituality. At the same time, Russian literature is distinguished by its high caliber. If one examines Russia’s cultural significance in the context of the Western world, or generally attempts to evaluate the nation’s achievements on a Western European scale, one finds that Russian literature stands out with particular distinction. The West places Leo Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky on a par with Shakespeare, while Chekhov’s plays enjoy a popularity comparable with the Bard’s in the sheer number of theatrical performances, even in England, where Chekhov’s Western renown …

The Aesthetic Code Of Russian Postmodernism, Mark Lipovetsky

Russian Culture

Postmodernist discourse has become central to literary criticism in the 1990s. Unlike many other literary discourses, it was never formally announced, yet beginning in the late 1980s (with Mikhail Epstein’s articles) it took over almost all literary publications and effectively led to a new polarization of literary forces. If, during the first years of Perestroika, literary and cultural factions were divided primarily along political lines, with Western liberal sympathizers and anti-Communists on one side, and nationalist defenders of Communism on the other, then by the middle of the 1990s debate about postmodernism had split the liberals into those who sided …

The Survival Of Art And The Art Of Survival In Stalin's Russia, Marietta Chudakova

Russian Culture

There are several questions that should be posed before one begins the study of 20th century Russian literature, to prevent such an undertaking from becoming merely a series of witty observations. The first of these questions is where do the boundaries of 20th century literature lie, not in the order of books on a bookshelf, but as objects of academic study? The second is how unified was the the literary process, which is the primary focus of the literary historian? In modern academic and near-academic discourse two approaches exist to answering these questions.

The Art Of Dissent: Parody, Travesty And Irony In Late Soviet Culture, Dmitri N. Shalin

Russian Culture

Irony is the favorite tool of Russian postmodernists fighting discourse totalitarianism. They wield it like a crowbar to pry open in the simulacrum, to tear down the Potemkin portable villages built by forced discursive labor. Every new blow the ironist strikes against the official reality reaffirms his intonational freedom amidst the most coercive discourse. An ultimate weapon of the spiritual proletariat, irony proves to the intellectual that he is a subject rather than an object of discourse. Alas, ironic vigil takes its toll. The self busily disclaiming identity with itself loses track of what it really is. It knows not …

The Art Of Criticism? Criticism As Art!, Natalia Ivanova

Russian Culture

The study of Russian-Soviet and post-Soviet literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century (henceforth denoted in the text as RLC) has been largely based on the chronological principle.

By way of introduction, I will begin with a brief overview of the RLC phenomenon-its origins, fundamental characteristics, and processes of change.

Colonizing Chaos: Russian Literature At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Alexander Genis

Russian Culture

Culture sets the parameters of our reality, defines its boundaries, gives each of us a system of values and reference points and, most important, provides our subconscious with the materials necessary for an awareness of chaos and the universe, space and time, cause and effect. Beginning my essay with these broadest categories, I will attempt to sketch the coordinates of that landscape in which the stormy drama of post-Soviet literature is played out. This will be followed by an analysis of the literary situation in the period directly preceding our own. Coming next will be some brief sketches of nine …