Russian Literature Commons^™

God Poezii 2022, Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

Fet, V. (ed.). God poezii 2022 [Year of Poetry 2022]. Kyiv: Drukarskii dvir Oleha Fedorova. 2022. 656 p.

Year of Poetry 2022 brought together around 90 authors of different generations from various countries who continue to write in Russian beyond the borders of the crumbling empire. We are proud that this book is being published in Kyiv. Whatever we write about, the hearts and poems of those who cannot remain silent are with fighting Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine!

Год поэзии 2022. (Сост. В. Фет). Київ: Друкарський двiр Олега Федорова. 2022. 656 c …

Doppelgängers And Doubles In Literature: A Comparison Of Fyodor Dostoevsky’S Crime And Punishment And Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, Meghan E. Cooper

College Honors Program

This thesis is dedicated to the concept of the double character in literature and how such characters were utilized by authors Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita (1955). First, this thesis discusses the theoretical aspects of the double—a villainous character who mirrors another character in some way, whether in appearance or in their actions— and the religious, psychological, philosophical, and societal roots of the concept of a double in literature. Then it explores how double characters in Dostoevsky and Nabokov’s works serve a crucial role in their novels by mirroring the worst traits of …

The Annotated Translation Of The Diary Of Lidia Makarovna Androsova, Rosa Lovo

Arts & Sciences Student Symposium

This play is based on the true story and focuses on a sector of the Young Guard i Eastern Ukraine during WWII. The Germans took control of Eastern Ukraine in July 1942. By the end of September, the smaller rebel groups in the city of Krasnodon united to form the Young Guard. The Young Guard sought to sabotage any German activity in the city and surrounding villages while also covertly sharing accurate news about the war. All actions portrayed here were described in the diary of Lidia Makarovna Androsova which the researcher translated over the course of 10 weeks. This …

Becoming An Andegraund Poet: Elena Shvarts And The Literary Environment Of The Late Soviet Era, Laura Little

Slavic Studies Faculty Publications

My dissertation focuses on Elena Shvarts (1948-2010), a Russian-language poet of the “unofficial” culture that flourished alongside state-sponsored arts in the post-war USSR. I ask how Shvarts became a leading talent of her generation in 1960s-1970s Leningrad, producing a substantial and sophisticated body of work without access to traditional print audiences. Studying Shvarts’s strategies for self-realization enhances our understanding of the forces that shaped late Soviet literature and the cultural field of dissidence from within and without. I trace her formation and rise to recognition, interweaving discussions of the political, literary, and social environment of her youth and early adulthood …

Flap Your Wings For Goodbye: Avian Imagery In Sasha Sokolov’S Between Dog And Wolf, José Vergara

Russian Faculty Research and Scholarship

The present article explicates a selection of bird imagery in Sasha Sokolov’s second novel, Between Dog and Wolf (1980). It analyzes the author’s use of certain birds and their folkloric and mythological subtexts for symbolic purposes. In particular, he pairs his protagonists with key birds (hoopoe, lapwing, goose, magpie, albatross) to underscore aspects of their personalities, behaviors, relationships, and experiences. This ornithic imagery emphasizes how the characters cannot overcome their temptations and other base feelings to attain higher meaning and ultimately remain bound to the physical, natural world. (For a plot synopsis of Between Dog and Wolf, please consult …

Mayakovsky On The Land, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

It is surprising that the poet whose self-proclaimed mission was to give city streets a language turned to publicizing farming collectives. No less noteworthy is the poet of internationalism working on the ethnocentric Crimea project of advertising Jewish agrarian communities. This paper addresses Mayakovsky’s collaboration on the film Evrei na zemle (Jews on the Land, 1927), and his poems ““Evrei (Tovarishcham iz OZETa)” (“Jew [To Comrades from OZET],” 1926) and “‘Zhid’” (“‘Yid’,” 1928). I argue that in these works the poet reshuffles the svoi-chuzhoi dichotomy. While using the Moses story of exile and liberation, the poet both domesticates the Jew …

Embodied Performance As Queer Theatre Historiography: Translation, Gender, Identity, And Temporalities In Mikhail Kuzmin's The Dangerous Precaution, Keenan Shionalyn

All Master's Theses

The “World of Art” and “The Tower,” two groups of symbolist artists in St. Petersburg at the turn of the 20^th century, are often noted for their contributions to queer art in poetry, literature, and the visual arts. However, the theatrical record has yet to acknowledge the significant contributions by these groups, largely ignoring their queer dramatic writings. Mikhail Kuzmin, a notable contributor in both groups of symbolists, is recognized for having contributed music to Meyerhold and Blok’s The Puppet Show but is less known for his multitude of plays. Seeking to remedy this problem, I examine one of …

The Forest, The Trees, The Bark, The Pith: An Intensive Look At The Circulation Rates Of Primary Texts In Ten Major Literature Areas At The University Of Oregon Libraries, Jeff D. Staiger

Charleston Library Conference

This poster looks at the circulation rate for literary primary texts, which constitute a unique area of collecting in academic libraries: while they do not in most cases meet immediate research needs, it is assumed that libraries ought to acquire them, for reasons including future research needs, preservation of the cultural record, and the ability of members of the intellectual community to stay current, those these remain primarily tacit. The circulation trends of contemporary literary works in ten areas of literature (English, American, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin American, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian) over the past twenty years at the …

The Censors In The Years Of The Calm, Jackson Taylor Jr.

Studies in English

No abstract provided.

Review Of La Bella España: El Teatro De Lope De Vega En La Rusia Soviética Y Postsoviética By Veronika Ryjik, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

There are certain writers whose importance only grows with time, and the longer the distance that separates us from them, the more facets of their genius they demonstrate to us, the readers of the twenty-first century. One of these authors is Lope de Vega. The new book of Veronika Ryjik now makes another major contribution to the scholarship of a great master who was well known and admired in Soviet Russia. It is indeed a serious study and one that fermented in the mind of the scholar for more than ten years – the true symbol of a truly remarkable …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

“Le Soleil De France”: Warm Translations Of Guy De Maupassant In Works By Isaak Babel’ And Ivan Bunin, Cassio De Oliveira

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the wake of Lev Tolstoi’s appraisals of his work, Guy de Maupassant was embraced by Russian twentieth-century authors who admired his mastery of the short story. The Soviet writer Isaak Babel’ and the émigré writer Ivan Bunin reference stories and other texts by Maupassant in their stories ‘Guy de Maupassant’ and ‘Bernard’. To these authors, Maupassant constitutes a means of expressing their own outlook on the craft of literature. Mediated by the act of translation from French into Russian, Maupassant’s writing enables the Russian authors to articulate distinct identities regarding their national literature: as Soviet and émigré.

On Angels’ Wings: Idolatry In Viktoria Tokareva’S “Five Figures On A Pedestal” And Lyudmila Ulitskaya’S “Angel”, Courtney E. Bentz

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

In his essays on Greek deities, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared: “Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.” While the idea of gods taking a corporeal form or angels walking among humans is a common literary trope, seldom do mortal characters find themselves compared to the divine without negative repercussions. Select post-Soviet women writers, however, flip this trope to explore the opposite. They instead embrace the human as holy, restrained by little consequence, as a means to highlight its destructive qualities in the context of an intimate relationship. These contemporary authors, Viktoria Tokareva and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, …

The Paganist Totem Birds In Slavic Folklore: The Black And The White, Anastasia Radzievska

Dissertations and Theses

It is believed that pagan cosmology once ran strong through the Slavic countries and traces are visible through the passed down folklore that spread through the land. While we talk of animals and their representation in folklore, we usually only refer to the Christian written western folklore, but these pagan born animals stand in strong contrast to them. The Slavic people believed that the world was made of diverse natural forces that shared what the Earth had to offer and worked in unison to protect one another, whereas the Christian belief saw the world as a distinct separation of man …

Issues Of Modernity In Russian And U.S. Southern Discourse: Literary And Cinematic Crosscurrents, Zachary John Killebrew

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation traces formulations of modernity, national and regional identity, and economy in the literature and film of Russia and the U.S. South from serfdom to the Second World War. Studying serf and slave narratives, Russian Realist and Southern Renaissance novels such as The Brothers Karamazov (1879), Demons (1872), The Sound and the Fury (1929), Tobacco Road (1932), and Wise Blood (1952), and American and Soviet films such as Volga, Volga (1938) and Cabin in the Sky (1943), this examination locates within Russo-Southern discourses a shared interest in striking out against Western or Northern epistemologies to assert a “peripheral” modernity …

Ivan And His Doubles: The Failure Of Intellect In The Brothers Karamazov, Alex Donley

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

The purpose of this research is to explore Dostoevsky’s theodicy in The Brothers Karamazov, including key critical commentary that enhances an understanding of the text. One of the novel’s title characters, Ivan, embodies the emerging spirit of intellectualism and freethinking in nineteenth-century Europe. He confronts the Christian concept of God in two famous speeches. First, Ivan’s “Rebellion” epitomizes the problem of evil by asking why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God allows earthy atrocities. Second, Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” rejects the moral freedom given to men, reasoning that it is too great a burden for mankind to bear. These arguments remain relevant …

Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko And The Conclusion Of Dostoevsky’S Idiot, Saera Yoon, Robert O. Efird

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko, and the Conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Idiot" Robert O. Efird and Saera Yoon discuss film adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel. Both in his homeland and abroad, the major works of Fyodor Dostoevsky have largely made for disappointing film adaptations. This article examines the cultural diversity and aesthetic motivations underlying two very different adaptations of his novel Idiot, with particular attention to the concluding scenes. Both Akira Kurosawa and Vladimir Bortko follow the novelist's lead by hinting at some form of hope and future redemption amidst the tragedy but, for different reasons, …

Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …

Intertextuality, Aesthetics, And The Digital: Rediscovering Chekhov In Early British Modernism, Sam Jacob

Modernist Short Story Project

Mark Halliday’s poem, “Chekhov,” published in 1992, raises a simple yet profound question regarding the Russian playwright and author, Anton Chekhov: What do we get from Chekhov? Considering the present article’s particular focus, Halliday’s query may be used to ask how Chekhov influenced early modernist writers (circa 1900-1930) from the British literary context. However, when considering the amount of scholarly work devoted to this question, the initial simplicity of Halliday’s inquiry evaporates, giving way to a breadth of complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. Such ambiguity has led scholars attempting to trace the intertextual convergence between Chekhov and the early modernist writers …

Vladimir Mayakovsky’S Agit-Semitism, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

Images of Jewishness as ethnic, cultural, and biblical categories in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s works are both plentiful and understudied. The present article attempts to bridge this gap while exploring the mechanisms that guide the poet’s responses to anti-Semitism. I begin by focusing on the function of the Exodus story in Stikhi ob Amerike(Verses about America), and then move to Mayakovsky’s “agitational” works: his collaboration on the film Evrei na zemle(Jews on the Land, 1927), and his poems ““Evrei (Tovarishcham iz OZETa)” (“Jew [To Comrades from OZET],” 1926) and “‘Zhid’” (“‘Yid’,” 1928). I argue that, while Mayakovsky continues the established …

Coming To Terms With Gonzo Journalism : An Analysis In Russian Formalism., Beau Kilpatrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gonzo journalism is notoriously difficult to define because of its ambiguous nature. To date, scholarly definitions focus on historical interpretations of Gonzo’s content, its connection to social and political contexts, or the biography of Hunter S. Thompson. These definitional attempts neglect the formal devices of the composition. This thesis aims to redefine Gonzo as its own genre by using the nearly forgotten methods of Russian formalism—specifically the works of Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Boris Tomashevsky—to analyze the formal devices and components of its form. The results are twofold; first, it acts to rejuvenate an unpopular literary theory by illustrating …

Forbidden Attraction: Russian Poets Read T. S. Eliot During The Cold War, Nataliya Karageorgos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this study is to demonstrate how the reception of T. S. Eliot, one of the leading proponents of Anglo-American modernism, shaped the aesthetics of Russian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, Russian culture found itself in a unique situation of separation from the Western world, with which it had largely identified in the previous century. The official change of the cultural paradigm that took place in the aftermath of the October Revolution led to the advancement of the literary theory and practices of Socialist Realism, shutting off modernist tendencies and …

Introduction. Dialogues With Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews 1967-1968., Slav N. Gratchev, Irina Evdokimova

Modern Languages Faculty Research

Dialogues with Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews 1967–1968 reflects the spirit of times—when the most dramatic events of the twentieth century were happening in Russia and the USSR. The first English translation of the 1967–1968 interviews with the founder of the Formalist School of literary theory, Viktor Shklovsky, this volume offers a slice of Russian micro-history that relies on the living voice of that history. Through the transcription of a six-hour phono-document, the readers will hear the voice of a real participant in events that for the longest time in the USSR were forbidden to be discussed or written about.

Don Quixote In Russia In The 1920s-1930s: The Problem Of Perception And Interpretation, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This study logically continues my previous examination of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia throughout the early twentieth century and how this perception changed over time. In this new article, which will be the third in a sequence of five, I will again use a number of materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars to demonstrate how the perception of Don Quixote by Russian intelligentsia shifted from being skeptical to complete admiration and even glorification of the hero. Don Quixote was increasingly compared with Prometheus, the most powerful and most romanticized personage of Greek methodology. Indeed, “. . . начав юмористический …

The Embodied Language Of Sasha Sokolov’S A School For Fools, José Vergara

Russian Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Blood, Water And Mars: Soviet Science And The Alchemy For A New Man, Sophie Y. Andarovna

All Master's Theses

The themes of blood, water and Mars in Soviet science and technology show the strong utopian and even religious foundations of Soviet society, which invariably centered around forging a new environment and, in so doing, a new variety of human to inhabit it. In the minds and experiments of some of the radical men behind Russia’s Revolution, blood was to create a more advanced, biologically “equal” humanity capable of potential immortality, while water was harnessed with the millenarian aim of transforming the Soviet Union’s vast landscape into fields of bountiful fertility, as well as cities of efficient industry. Mars represents …

Introduction: Scotland And Russia Since 1900, Anna Vaninskaya

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the project "Scottish-Russian Cultural Relations since 1900," based at the University of Edinburgh, the series of related symposia in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, and its extensive web-site of translations and other resources, and provides a brief narrative of cultural interactions between Scotland and Russia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including such key examples as the Russian presence at the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901, Korney Chukovsky's account of visiting Scottish troops in 1916, and the the Scotland-USSR Society's welcome to the Russian Burns translator Samuil Marshak and Burns biographer Anna Elistratova during the International Burns Festival of 1955.

Translations Of Robert Burns In The Russian Book Market: The Old And The New, Natalia Kaloh Vid

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the influence of Samuil Marshak's long-dominant Russian translations of Robert Burns's poems and the more recent anthologies and translations that "broke the Marshak monopoly," and briefly examines why, in publishing terms, the Marshak translations are still the most widely available.

‘The Shadow And The Law’: Stevenson, Nabokov And Dostoevsky, Rose France

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses Vladimir Nabokov's comments in lectures at Cornell praising Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde while condemning Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and compares the two novels' treatment of the double in their central character with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita.

'Like Pushkin, I': Hugh Macdiarmid And Russia, Patrick Crotty

Studies in Scottish Literature

A detailed discussion of the poetic development of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiamid (1892-1978), drawing on research for the forthcoming Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid to chart the changing ways in which he encountered, read, and responded to Russian writing, philosophy and culture in different phases of his career.