Soviet Heroic Poetry In Context

Key issues surrounding the composition and recording of folklore include its frequently intensely political aspect and it preoccupation with chimerical cultural authority. These issues are dramatically displayed in Soviet epic compositions of the 1930s and 1940s, the so-called noviny (“new songs”), which took their formal inspiration to a great extent from traditional Russian epic songs, byliny (“songs of the past"), and their narrative content from contemporary political and other events in Stalinist Russia. The story of the noviny is at once complex and comprehensible. While it may be tempting to interpret the excrescences of Stalinism as unique aberrations, the reality was often more complicated. The noviny were not simply the result of political fiat, an episode in an ideological vacuum. Their emergence occurred in part because of specific trends and controversies that marked European folklore collection and publication from at least the late eighteenth century on, as well as because of developments in Russian folkloristics from the mid-nineteenth century on that assumed perhaps exaggerated proportions. The demise of the noviny was equally mediated by a host of political and theoretical considerations. This study tells the story of the rise and fall of the noviny in all its cultural richness and pathos, an instructive tale of the interaction of aesthetics and ideology.

Originally published in 1932, this book presents a collection of Russian heroic poems, or byliny, edited and translated into English. The selections run in chronological order from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century, with particular focus on major historic figures such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

Focusing on a wide range of poetry written between 1941 and 1945, this work explores Soviet poets' response to World War II. It also traces the influence of Stalinist culture, and departures from literary conventions established in the pre-war years. In a chronological survey, the poets' immediate reaction to the events of the war is placed in its historical and literary-political context.

Identifies and explores Roman modes of poetry as received by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglo-American, German, and French poets.

This book shows how Persianate poetics and communist internationalism brought together 20th-century writers from across Eurasia.

Rivers in Russian Literature focuses on the Russian literary and folkloric treatment of five rivers—the Dnieper, Volga, Neva, Don, and Angara. Each chapter traces, within a geographical and historical context, the evolution of the literary representation of one river. Imagination may endow a river with aesthetic or spiritual qualities; ethnic, national, or racial associations; or commercial or agricultural symbolism of many kinds. Russian literary responses to these five rivers have much to tell us about the society that produced them as well as the rivers they treat. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation offers a detailed overview of the field of Persian literature in translation, discusses the development of the field, gives critical expression to research on Persian literature in translation, and brings together cutting-edge theoretical and practical research. The book is divided into the following three parts: (I) Translation of Classical Persian Literature, (II) Translation of Modern Persian Literature, and (III) Persian Literary Translation in Practice. The chapters of the book are authored by internationally renowned scholars in the field, and the volume is an essential reference for scholars and their advanced students as well as for those researching in related areas and for independent translators of Persian literature.