The fifteen essays in this volume explore the extraordinary range and diversity of the autobiographical mode in twentieth-century Russian literature from various critical perspectives. They will whet the appetite of readers interested in penetrating beyond the canonical texts of Russian literature. The introduction focuses on the central issues and key problems of current autobiographical theory and practice in both the West and in the Soviet Union, while each essay treats an aspect of auto-biographical praxis in the context of an individual author's work and often in dialogue with another of the included writers. Examined here are first the experimental writings of the early years of the twentieth century--Rozanov, Remizov, and Bely; second, the unique autobiographical statements of the mid-1920s through the early 1940s--Mandelstam, Pasternak, Olesha, and Zoshchenko; and finally, the diverse and vital contemporary writings of the 1960s through the 1980s as exemplified not only by creative writers but also by scholars, by Soviet citizens as well as by emigrs--Trifonov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lydia Ginzburg, Nabokov, Jakobson, Sinyavsky, and Limonov. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The essays in this volume seek to appreciate the literary construction of the memoir, with its dual agendas of individualized expression and reliable reportage, and explore its functions as interpretive history, social modelling, and political expression in Russian culture. The memoirs under scrutiny range widely, including those of the private person (Princess Natalia Dolgorukaia), sophisticated high culture writers (Nikolai Zabolotskii, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky), cultural critics and facilitators (Lidiia Ginzburg, Avdot'ia Panaeva), political dissidents (Evgeniia Ginzburg, Elena Bonner), and popular artists (filmmaker Elidar Riazanov). It examines each memoir for its aesthetic and rhetorical features as well as its cultural circumstances. In mapping the memoir's social and historical significance, the essays consider a wide range of influences and issues, including the specific impact of the author's class, gender, ideology, and life experience on his/her witnessing of Russian culture and society.

The 1980s witnessed the ascendency of Russian women in multiple spheres of artistic creation, including literature, film, and painting. This volume may thus be said to engage not only women's artistic production but, indeed, the best and most colourful of recent Russian culture. Treating contemporary Russian women's creativity, it approaches women's texts, films, and canvasses from a range of perspectives, from anti-gendered to feminist. Some of the essays introduce writers not previously well studied, others challenge conventional interpretations and assumptions, while still others yield original viewpoints through novel juxtapositions. In addition to offering insights into the various artists under analysis, the essays map the wide terrain of issues and methodologies proliferating in cultural criticism today, and mirror the diversity that is one of the most appealing features of women's creativity in contemporary Russia.

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.

A History of Women's Writing in Russia offers a comprehensive account of the lives and works of Russia's women writers. Based on original and archival research, this volume forces a re-examination of many of the traditionally held assumptions about Russian literature and women's role in the tradition. In setting about the process of reintegrating women writers into the history of Russian literature, contributors have addressed the often surprising contexts within which women's writing has been produced. Chapters reveal a flourishing literary tradition where none was thought to exist. They redraw the map defining Russia's literary periods, they look at how Russia's women writers articulated their own experience, and they reassess their relationship to the dominant male tradition. The volume is supported by extensive reference features including a bibliography and guide to writers and their works.

This is a long overdue examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol'ga Berggol'ts (1910-1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This volume addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity. Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as 'official' figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept, and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol'ts's work shows that the borders between 'official' and 'unofficial' literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. Dr Hodgson discusses how Berggol'ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy, and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol'ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion which connects texts of different genres, 'official' as well as 'unofficial' writing. This study will provoke readers into reassessing the cultural heritage of an era that can seem remote and impenetrable, but which (like Ol'ga Berggol'ts) was far more complex and intriguing.

A 1996 overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, from 1600 onwards.

These six women all wrote the stories of their own lives, creating powerful narratives that channelled cultural forces at the same time as parrying them.

In Slavic studies, aging and old age have thus far been only marginal concerns. This volume brings together the scattered research that has been done up to now on aging as represented and narrated in Slavic literatures. The essays investigate Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene and Ukrainian representations of age/aging in various literary genres and epochs and analyze age as a powerful marker of difference and as constitutive of social relations and personal identity.