Montaging Pushkin

Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin's legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights. Pushkin is shown to be a Russian forerunner of Baudelaire. Furthermore it is argued that the rise of the Russian and European novel largely changed the ways Russian poets have looked at themselves and at poetic language; that novelisation of poetry is detectable in the major works of poetry that engaged in a creative dialogue with Pushkin, and that polyphonic lyric has been achieved. Alexandra Smith locates significant examples of Pushkin's cinematographic cognition of reality, suggesting that such dynamic descriptions of Petersburg helped create a highly original animated image of the city as comic apocalypse, which followers of Pushkin appropriated very successfully even as far as the late twentieth century. Montaging Pushkin will be of interest to all students of Russian poetry, as well as specialists in literary theory, European studies and the history of ideas. "Smith's thesis is both startling and original: that Pushkin, for all his Mozart-like fluidity and perfection, can be productively read as a poet of pain and violence. His reflex was to respond to the totalizing, authoritative public landscape of his era with an equally severe but specifically private, individualizing, disciplined set of demands on the Poet. The recurring attention that later generations have paid toward those aspects of Pushkin's life and texts governed by the private right to resist or to initiate violence (his duel, his struggles with the bureaucracy, his failed pursuit of service with honour) suggest that this mythologeme is among the most productive in Pushkin's astonishing legacy" CARYL EMERSON (A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University) "Smith's innovative study offers a wonderful analysis of how cinematographic editing and polyphony are detected in Russian twentieth-century poetry... It views Pushkin as a "reference obligee" of contemporary urban poetry" VERONIQUE LOSSKY (Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne IV)

A collection of writings and memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein.

Veteran filmmaker Mrinal Sen has always seen his life and work as part of the social and political fabric of his time. As he has continued to experiment with cinema over the decades, evolving his own quest in response to the changing times, he has also maintained an acute social critique which shows in his films, writings and interviews. The enfant terrible of Indian cinema in the 1960s and 70s, he is now known for his subtle nuanced films which capture a moment of crisis, a moment of truth, in the ordinary lives of ordinary people. This collection encapsulates close to half a century of filmmaking. It includes original writings, memoirs, letters, musings on politics, literature, theatre and cinema; critiques of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Chaplin and a host of other international filmmakers especially those from Latin-America; and intensive interviews with scholars, critics and filmmakers such as Samik Bandyopadhyay, Swapan Mullick and Reinhard Hauff. In juxtaposition with intimate photographs of the artist at work and stills from his movies, these form a rare montage of the filmmaker and the man, mapping an unusual creative landscape which offers valuable insights into his films. There is also a complete filmography encompassing his features, telefilms and documentaries