This collection of essays thrusts Brodsky--heretofore known more for his poetry and translations--into the forefront of the "Third Wave" of Russian emigre writers. His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden. The book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay.

This definitive anthology gathers stories, essays, memoirs, excerpts from novels, and poems by more than 130 Jewish writers of the past two centuries who worked in the Russian language. It features writers of the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, both in Russia and in the great emigrations, representing styles and artistic movements from Romantic to Postmodern. The authors include figures who are not widely known today, as well as writers of world renown. Most of the works appear here for the first time in English or in new translations. The editor of the anthology, Maxim D. Shrayer of Boston College, is a leading authority on Jewish-Russian literature. The selections were chosen not simply on the basis of the author's background, but because each work illuminates questions of Jewish history, status, and identity. Each author is profiled in an essay describing the personal, cultural, and historical circumstances in which the writer worked, and individual works or groups of works are headnoted to provide further context. The anthology not only showcases a wide selection of individual works but also offers an encyclopedic history of Jewish-Russian culture. This handsome two-volume set is organized chronologically. The first volume spans the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, and includes the editor's extensive introduction to the Jewish-Russian literary canon. The second volume covers the period from the death of Stalin to the present, and each volume includes a corresponding survey of Jewish-Russian history by John D. Klier of University College, London, as well as detailed bibliographies of historical and literary sources.

"...this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people's history"--Publisher's info.

"Roll over Derrida: Literature and Revolution is back in print. Nothing in the postmodern canon comes close to the intellectual grandeur of Trotsky's vision of art and literature in an age of revolution, or his extraordinary meditations on the popular ownership of culture."--Mike Davis "Re-reading Trotsky on literature 40 years later is a delight."--Tariq Ali Leon Trotsky penned this engaging book to elucidate the complex way in which art informs-- and can alter--our understanding of the world. Features new reader-friendly explanatory notes. Leon Trotsky was a leader of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and is the author of My Life . William Keach is a professor of English at Brown University. He is editor of Coleridge's Complete Poems .

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

"The title work, "Journey On a Hospital Bed" (1924), a memoir by the Russian writer Lev Lunts, together with articles, letters and stories by the same author. To these are added articles and letters by 20-30 Russian writers with whom Lev Lunts was associated. The total contents consist of 13 articles from 1921-1966, 88 letters from 1923-1924, one long memoir from 1924, and 2 stories from 1921 & 1924, all (with one exception) translated from Russian into English for the first time. Illustrated by approx. 50 photographs of people and 10 reproductions of manuscripts, most from the 1920s. All the articles relate to the group "The Serapion Brothers" and the literary scene in St. Petersburg in the early 1920s. All the correspondence dates from 1923-1924, when Lev Lunts lay dying in a sanatorium and hospital in Germany"--Publisher info.

"This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov-poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography"--

Text: English (translation) Original Language: French