Russian Literature And Its Demons

Author : Pamela Davidson
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 9781571817587
Total Pages : 552 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Russian Literature and Its Demons written by Pamela Davidson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merezhkovsky's bold claim that "all Russian literature is, to a certain degree, a struggle with the temptation of demonism" is undoubtedly justified. And yet, despite its evident centrality to Russian culture, the unique and fascinating phenomenon of Russian literary demonism has so far received little critical attention. This substantial collection fills the gap. A comprehensive analytical introduction by the editor is follwed by a series of fourteen essays, written by eminent scholars in their fields. The first part explores the main shaping contexts of literary demonism: the Russian Orthodox and folk tradition, the demonization of historical figures, and views of art as intrinsically demonic. The second part traces the development of a literary tradition of demonism in the works of authors ranging from Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Dostoevsky, through to the poets and prose writers of modernism (including Blok, Akhmatova, Bely, Sologub, Rozanov, Zamiatin), and through to the end of the 20th century.

Author : Fyodor Dostoevsky
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307434869
Total Pages : 768 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Demons written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-05-19 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Author : Fyodor Sologub
Publisher : DigiCat
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Little Demon written by Fyodor Sologub and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Little Demon is an engrossing tale of rage, desperate affection, and subtle opportunism in a small Russian provincial town shortly after the turn of the 20th century. It narrates the story of Peredonov, the antihero, a petty official who lives in constant hate for the world around him and life itself. Throughout the novel, Peredonov struggles to be promoted to governmental inspector of his province and starts going paranoid and hallucinating. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting. He is at once a victim, a monster, a foolish hypocrite, and a vicious nitwit. The plot moves from him to the hopeless romance of the boy Sasha Pylnikov and a much older woman Ludmila Rutilova. Fyodor Sologub's The Little Demon is one of the most humorous and the most scandalous of the great Russian classics, packed with nude boys, curvy girls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. Even in its censored form, it is considered one of the most infuriating and sexually open of the Russian books classics.

Author : Elif Batuman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 142993641X
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Possessed written by Elif Batuman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED—ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!—TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

Author : Ani Kokobobo
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780814254684
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Russian Grotesque Realism written by Ani Kokobobo and published by . This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a rereading of the Russian realist novel and proposes a hybrid genre, grotesque realism, to describe changes during the post-Reform era.

Author : Fyodor Dostoevsky
Publisher : DigiCat
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 785 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Demons (The Possessed / The Devils) - The Unabridged Garnett Translation written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2023-11-19 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully crafted ebook: "Demons (The Possessed / The Devils) - The Unabridged Garnett Translation" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Demons is an 1872 novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Though titled The Possessed in the initial English translation, Dostoyevsky scholars and later translations favour the titles The Devils or Demons. An extremely political book, Demons is a testimonial of life in Imperial Russia in the late 19th century. As the revolutionary democrats begin to rise in Russia, different ideologies begin to collide. Dostoyevsky casts a critical eye on both the liberal idealists, portraying their ideas and ideological foundation as demonic, and the conservative establishment's ineptitude in dealing with those ideas and their social consequences. The entire novel takes place in a small town outside of Petersberg and is narrated by a man named Mr. Govorov. Mr. Govorov does not witness every conversation first hand, but nonetheless the narrator describes the story as if he partook in every situation or as a chronicler, who had the events described to him. We know very little of Mr. Govorov, except that he is a close friend of Stephan Trofimovich. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky ( 1821 – 1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

Author : Mark R Pettus
Publisher : Mark R. Pettus
ISBN 13 : 9781087970714
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time / The Demon in Russian written by Mark R Pettus and published by Mark R. Pettus. This book was released on 2021-06-02 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented here together, in their entirety - in the original Russian and in a facing English translation, new for this edition - are two masterpieces of Russian literature by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), both set in the Caucasus: The Demon, a narrative poem, and A Hero of Our Time, a novel. The Demon was deemed so scandalous at the time it was written that it was first published in Russia only in 1856 - and then only in a handful of copies for the royal family! It tells of a beautiful Georgian princess, Tamara, who awakens long-forgotten feelings of love in a Demon when he sees her dancing on the eve of her wedding. After the untimely death of her would-be husband, Tamara enters a convent, but a voice continues to tempt her. At last the Demon appears to her, to profess his love... and Tamara's soul hangs in the balance... A Hero of Our Time is many things at once: a travelogue documenting the astounding natural beauty of the Caucasus and the spirit of its many peoples; an adventure novel with everything from kidnappings to duels; a catalogue of tragic romantic encounters; a novel of (bad) manners; and a disturbing psychological study of its infamous anti-hero, Pechorin, the first (alongside Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin) of many deeply conflicted - if not demonic - figures in Russian literature. As Lermontov himself makes clear, the idea that Pechorin is "heroic" is to be taken with a great deal of irony! Mirroring each other in many ways, these two works are productively read together, with The Demonproviding a fantastical poetic overture to the realist prose of A Hero of Our Time. Together, they make for captivating reading. Book 4 in the "Reading Russian" series, this edition provides the original text and facing English translation, together with all the vocabulary notes and reference tables you need to make sense of the original. Designed to help students of Russian begin to enjoy real Russian literature in the original without constantly reaching for a dictionary, this parallel-text edition features a new translation made specifically for this purpose, as well as detailed Russian vocabulary notes, including all the important forms you need (especially aspectual pairs and conjugation types for all verbs). The original Russian text is marked for stress, but is otherwise unedited and unsimplified.

Author : Mark Pettus
Publisher : Independently Published
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 435 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time / The Demon in Russian written by Mark Pettus and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-05-29 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented here together, in their entirety -- in the original Russian and in a facing English translation, new for this edition -- are two masterpieces of Russian literature by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), both set in the Caucasus: The Demon, a narrative poem, and A Hero of Our Time, a novel. The Demon was deemed so scandalous at the time it was written that it was first published in Russia only in 1856 -- and then only in a handful of copies for the royal family! It tells of a beautiful Georgian princess, Tamara, who awakens long-forgotten feelings of love in a Demon when he sees her dancing on the eve of her wedding. After the untimely death of her would-be husband, Tamara enters a convent, but a voice continues to tempt her. At last the Demon appears to her, to profess his love... and Tamara's soul hangs in the balance... A Hero of Our Time is many things at once: a travelogue documenting the astounding natural beauty of the Caucasus and the spirit of its many peoples; an adventure novel with everything from kidnappings to duels; a catalogue of tragic romantic encounters; a novel of (bad) manners; and a disturbing psychological study of its infamous anti-hero, Pechorin, the first (alongside Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin) of many deeply conflicted -- if not demonic -- figures in Russian literature. As Lermontov himself makes clear, the idea that Pechorin is "heroic" is to be taken with a great deal of irony! Mirroring each other in many ways, these two works are productively read together, with The Demon providing a fantastical poetic overture to the realist prose of A Hero of Our Time. Together, they make for captivating reading. Book 4 in the "Reading Russian" series, this edition provides the original text and facing English translation, together with all the vocabulary notes and reference tables you need to make sense of the original. Designed to help students of Russian begin to enjoy real Russian literature in the original without constantly reaching for a dictionary, this parallel-text edition features a new translation made specifically for this purpose, as well as detailed Russian vocabulary notes, including all the important forms you need (especially aspectual pairs and conjugation types for all verbs). The original Russian text is marked for stress, but is otherwise unedited and unsimplified.

Author : Neil Cornwell
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 9781571819079
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vladimir Odoevsky and Romantic Poetics written by Neil Cornwell and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian thinker, pedagogue, musicologist, amateur scientist, and public servant Odoevsky (1804-69) was mentioned in the same breath as Pushkin and Gogol during his day, and is now enjoying (we presume) a revival as a writer of Romantic and Gothic fiction. Cornwell (Russian and comparative literature, U. of Bristol, England) analyzes his contribution to Russian prose fiction, particularly his approach to Romanticism, his Gothic novellas, his proto-science fiction, and his critical reception. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author : Mikhail Epstein
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 9781571810281
Total Pages : 552 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Russian Postmodernism written by Mikhail Epstein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last ten years were decisive for Russia, not only in the political sphere, but also culturally as this period saw the rise and crystallization of Russian postmodernism. The essays, manifestos, and articles gathered here investigate various manifestations of this crucial cultural trend. Exploring Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, they provide a point of departure and a valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies which is currently insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. A brief but useful "Who's Who in Russian Postmodernism" as an appendix introduces many authors who have never before appeared in a reference work of this kind and renders this book essential reading for those interested in the latest trends in Russian intellectual life.