The Shape Of Apocalypse In Modern Russian Fiction

David Bethea examines the distinctly Russian view of the "end" of history in five major works of modern Russian fiction. Originally published in 1989. 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.

Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourié. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourié was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourié left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourié serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourié himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourié attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourié's own. Yet even if Lourié seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourié's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourié, and the world, saw disappear.

A fully updated new edition of this overview of contemporary Russia and the influence of its Soviet past.

The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is an engaging and accessible guide to Russian writing of the past thousand years. The volume covers the entire span of Russian literature, from the Middle Ages to the post-Soviet period, and explores all the forms that have made it so famous: poetry, drama and, of course, the Russian novel. A particular emphasis is given to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Russian literature achieved world-wide recognition through the works of writers such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. Covering a range of subjects including women's writing, Russian literary theory, socialist realism and émigré writing, leading international scholars open up the wonderful diversity of Russian literature. With recommended lists of further reading and an excellent up-to-date general bibliography, The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature is the perfect guide for students and general readers alike.

A study of the 'demonic markers' that run throughout Dostoevsky's fiction, this also explores the narrative and generic implications of the way Dostoevsky inscribed the demonic in his fictional works - implications that point to a new understanding of familiar concepts in the work of this Russian master.

Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute. The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

Many Russian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made a huge impact, not only inside the boundaries of their own country but across the western world. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of these novels, in fourteen newly-commissioned essays by prominent European and North American scholars. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philosophy; the romantic, realist and modernist traditions; and technique, gender and theory. In this context the work of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, among others, is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading; all quotations are in English. This volume will be invaluable not only for students and scholars but for anyone interested in the Russian novel.