Flames from the Earth is an autobiographical novel by Isaiah Spiegel, one of the most revered Yiddish authors to survive the Holocaust, depicting the complex web of relationships in and around the Łódź Ghetto.
Russian Formalism is considered the foundational movement of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the school given the current commitment within literary studies to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms.
Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. The Letters and the Law is the first book to frame the conflict between writers and lawyers as a competition for cultural authority.
What makes characters seem real? This book explores the ways Tolstoy and Dostoevsky created the illusion of autonomous characters, through techniques that paradoxically hindered the writers’ ambitions for the novel as a genre.
Word Play focuses on the intertwined fates of children’s literature and underground poetry throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature experimental poets whose unpublished work was not written for children but featured a childlike lyric speaker, diction, form, and humor.
This is the first book-length English-language study of Victor Pelevin, one of the most significant and popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet era. The text explores Pelevin’s sustained reflections on the subversion of freedom.
Only Among Women investigates the idea of women’s community—a utopian women’s sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest—in Russian literature and culture from the age of the classic Russian novel to socialist realism and Stalinist film.
An engrossing study of responses by seven non-Jewish Polish writers—Kornel Filipowicz, Józef Mackiewicz, Tadeusz Borowski, Zofia Kossak, Leopold Buczkowski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Stefan Otwinowski—to the Holocaust in wartime and postwar Polish literature.
In Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin, Ksana Blank borrows from ancient Greek, Chinese, and Christian dialectical traditions to formulate a dynamic image of Dostoevsky’s dialectics—distinct from Hegelian dialectics—as a philosophy of “compatible contradictions.” Expanding on the classical triad of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, Blank guides us through Dostoevsky’s most difficult paradoxes: goodness that begets evil, beautiful personalities that bring about grief, and criminality that brings about salvation.
When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts—the text—of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand.
