Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism is a provocative exploration of the cultivation of weak subjectivity in late Soviet fiction as both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code.
Revolutions in Verse: The Medium of Russian Modernism shows how the early Soviet proliferation of interartistic modernist experiments and the emergence of new media technologies made poetry visible as a medium in its own right.
An in-depth study of exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky’s translations of his own Russian poems into “new originals” in English offers a radical reappraisal of these works and of the project of translation itself.
Challenging, revising, and expanding on Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Lynn Ellen Patyk demonstrates that provocation drives Dostoevsky's poetics of conflict, and she identifies the literary devices he uses to propel plot conflict and capture our attention.
This book posits that Leo Tolstoy’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s seemingly antithetical aesthetics stem from the same fear—that one’s experience of the world might be entirely private and impossible to share through art.
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.
Anna Schur incorporates sources from philosophy, criminology, psychology, and history to argue that Dostoevsky’s thinking was shaped not only by his Christian ethics but also by the debates on punishment theory and practice unfolding during his lifetime.
In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland shows that Dostoevsky aimed to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting the disintegration caused by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s.
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.
