John E. Bowlt. Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life & Culture of the Russian Silver Age. Vendome Press, 2009.
“This lushly illustrated volume captures the artistic explosion that was Russia's Silver Age.” ~ Russian Life
“(An) authoritative feast of a book.” ~ The Irish Times
“Splendidly illustrated, beautifully designed . . .”~ Shepherd Express
“A truly seminal work . . .” ~ Midwest Book Review
Lavishly illustrated, Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900- 1920 is the quintessential guide to Russia’s vibrant and influential Silver Age.
In this elegantly written narrative survey, John E. Bowlt sheds new light on Russia’s Silver Age, the period of artistic renaissance that flourished as Imperial Russia’s power waned. Much of the creative energy could be attributed to the Symbolist movement, whose proponents sought to transcend the barriers of bourgeois civility and whose unconventional lifestyles led some critics to label them Decadents and Degenerates. But, as Sergei Diaghilev declared, theirs was not a moral or artistic decline, but a voyage of inner discovery and a reinvention of a national culture.
Bowlt’s richly textured volume focuses not only on Russia’s best known artists from this period - Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Igor Stravinsky, Anna Pavlova, and poet Anna Akhmatova - but also on lesser known attainments of the period, including experimental theater, Nikolai Kalmakov’s innovative painting, and the free dance practiced by followers of Duncan and Dalcroze.
Thomas Seifrid. A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit.
Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.
Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.
A Feast of Wonders: Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
Edited by John E. Bowlt and Zelfira Tregulova. New York: Rizzoli / Skira, 2009.
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In May 1909, Sergei Diaghilev astonished the world of dance with his first ballet presentations in Paris that demonstrated an unprecedented combination of vitality and grace, originality, and technical sophistication. This catalogue of over three hundred artworks related to the Saisons Russes between 1909 and 1929 is the official companion to an exhibition in Monte Carlo. The legendary productions are brought to life through stage designs, costumes, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and programs. The artwork comes from a wide variety of public and private collections, including the Fokine collection in the St. Petersburg Theatre Museum. Diaghilev’s scenic achievements are complemented by a number of contextual paintings, drawings, and other artifacts, which help to define Russia’s cultural renaissance of the first decades of the twentieth century. The documentary section of the catalog contains rich archival material, including letters, photographs, choreographic notes, and memoirs, many published here for the first time. |
Marcus C. Levitt. Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History.Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.
The volume brings together twenty essays by Prof. Levitt concerning a spectrum of works and issues that shaped the development of modern Russian literature. The first part of the collection explores the career and works of Alexander Sumarokov, who played a formative role in literary life of his day. In the essays of the second part Levitt argues that the Enlightenment’s privileging of vision played an especially important role in eighteenth-century Russian culture, and that this “ocularcentrism” was profoundly shaped by indigenous religious views. Early Modern Russian Letters offers a series of original and provocative perspectives on a fascinating but little studied period.
and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.
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Viktor Zhivov's Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia is one of the most important studies ever published on eighteenth-century Russia. Historians and students of Russian culture agree that the creation of a Russian literary language was key to the formation of a modern secular culture, and Language and Culture traces the growth of a vernacular language from the "hybrid Slavonic" of the late seventeenth century through the debates between "archaists and innovators" of the early nineteenth century. Zhivov's study is an essential work on the genesis of modern Russian culture; the aim of this translation is to make it available to historians and students of Russian culture. |
Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture 
Edited by Marcus C. Levitt and Tatyana Novikov. University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
"The first book of its kind to address head-on the problem of violence in Russian culture."-Angela Brintlinger, Ohio State University
Looking at the country that has added to our vocabulary such colorful terms as "purges," "pogroms," and "gulag," this collection investigates the conspicuous marks of violence in Russian history and culture.
Russians and non-Russians alike have long debated the reasons for this endemic violence. Some have cited Russia's huge size, unforgiving climate, and exposed geographical position as formative in its national character, making invasion easy and order difficult. Others have fixed the blame on cultural and religious traditions that spurred internecine violence or on despotic rulers or unfortunate episodes in the nation's history, such as the Mongol invasion, the rule of Ivan the Terrible, or the "Red Terror" of the revolution. Even in contemporary Russia, the specter of violence continues, from widespread mistreatment of women to racial antagonism, the product of a frustrated nationalism that manifests itself in such phenomena as the wars in Chechnya.
Times of Trouble is the first book in English to explore the problem of violence in Russia. From a variety of perspectives, essays investigate Russian history as well as depictions of violence in the visual arts and in literature, including the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nina Sadur. From the Mongol invasion to the present day, topics include the gulag, genocide, violence against women, anti-Semitism, and terrorism as a tool of revolution.
Frederick H. White (USC PhD 2002), Memoirs and Madness: 
Leonid Andreev Through the Prism of the Literary Portrait. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006. 
Dr. White is assistant professor of German and Russian at Memorial University.
Memoirs and Madness examines memoir as a literary genre, investigates the creation of Leonid Andreev's posthumous legacy by his contemporaries, and explores the possibility that Andreev, Russia's leading literary figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, suffered from mental illness.
Dr. White's primary focus is A Book About Leonid Andreev (1922), the most important collection of memoirs dedicated to the Russian author, presented here in the first English translation. The agendas of the memoirists resulted in portraits that have influenced how Andreev is read and spoken about to the present day. White pays special attention to Andreev's history of mental illness, which the memoirists described with vague terms such as "creative energy" or "inner turmoil." Past scholarship has focused on philosophical and sociological factors in the author's life but this concentration on his mental health provides a fruitful approach to deciphering the literary portraits.
Memoirs and Madness was winner of the Book Jacket and Journal Award, Association of American University Presses (2006). You may see a copy of this handsome work on display outside the department at THH 255.
Thomas Seifrid, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860-1930. Cornell University Press, 2005.
In his most recent book, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860-
1930, Professor Seifrid explores the Russian fascination with the power of the word as expressed in the work of philosophers, theologians, and artists of the Silver Age and early Soviet period. He shows that their diverse works (poems, novels, philosophical and religious tracts) share an attempt to articulate "a model of selfhood within the phenomenon of language."
The thinkers included in this book-among them Pavel Florenskii, Roman Jakobson, Aleksei Losev, and Gustav Shpet -- frequently responded to the work of contemporary European philosophers even as they drew upon and revitalized powerful elements of early Russian religious thought. On Seifrid's view, this highly original body of writing about language was the essential context for the development of Russian Futurism, Formalism, and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Soviet structuralists-movements and ideas whose influence has extended far beyond Russia and long past their years of efflorescence. In the end this study aims to recover for a western readership this long-suppressed chapter in the history of Russian culture.
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An Exhibit and Catalogue
The Princess & the Patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin and the Age of Enlightenment. Ed. Sue Ann Prince. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 96, Part 1. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2005.
Volume accompanying the exhibit at the American Philosophical Society.
Includes: Marcus C. Levitt, "Virtue Must Advertise:Dashkova's Mon histoire and the Problem of Self-Representation," pp.39-56
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By USC doctoral candidate Yuri Leving, who is an assistant professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Train Station - Garage - Hangar: Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of 
Russian Urbanism. St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 400 pp., illustrations, cloth, 2004.
This publication was supported by the Department of Slavic Languages.
Train Station - Garage - Hangar: Vladimir Nabokov and Poetics of Russian Urbanism explores the poetics of movement and urban space in the oeuvre of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov's works are examined from the specific point of view of poetics of urbanism, a phenomenon that the author examines within the context of Russian and European literature of the XIX - beginning of the XX century. The book encompasses a broad territory of literary modernism, exploring three major motifs: train, automobile, and plane. Nabokov's corpus is taken as the culmination of these motifs; although Nabokov was not the last to use them, and may not even have carried them as far as some other writers, they found profound artistic embodiment in his work.
The work utilizes substantial archival material and is richly illustrated. The rare photographs from private Nabokov family archive are published by courtesy of Mr. Dmitri Nabokov.
Focused on Russian literature, Yuri Leving's book is not limited to it. Train Station - Garage - Hangar offers a kind of cultural thesaurus of modern technology as reflected in literature.
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Lada Panova is a visiting researcher in the Department of Slavic Languages.
Lada Panova. Russkii Egipet. Moscow: Vodolei Publishers & Progress-Pleiada, 2006.
The monograph Russian Egypt. Mikhail Kuzmin's Alexandrian Poetics is the first book-length study of egyptomania in Russian literature. It consists of two parts and five appendices.
Part One, "Russian Egypt and its origins", traces the stages passed by European literature and - in its footsteps - Russian literature in search of authentic Egypt. These stages were determined either by egyptological breakthroughs or by such fashions in egyptomania as freemasonry, occultism etc.
The Egyptian theme developed in Russian literature continuously from the end of the 18th century through 1920s, comprising some 260 texts written by about seventy authors. It reached its peak in refined, culturally and esoterically oriented Silver Age and was forced out by the onset of Soviet ideology after 1917. During those 150 years the Russian Egypt created its own palette: local color; special vocabulary; plots borrowed from the Bible, Greek and Latin writers, Ancient Egyptian history and early Christianity (Moses and Josef; Ramses II and Akhenaton; Cleopatra; Saint Anthony) as well as plots reflecting various aspects of egyptomania (ancient Egyptian sphinxes and obelisks brought to modern cities; mummies; archeologists in pursuit of antiquities; spiritualist seances); ancient Egyptian background; ancient Egyptian literature (used in fiction for ornamental purposes); fragmented structure, imitating badly preserved papyri; and free verse as an analog of unknown ancient Egyptian versification.
Special stress in this part is put on Silver Age poetry as it worked out Egyptian topos. This topos adopted the best from the Parnassians (and other European schools), adding to it mystical and esoteric motifs and involving all that in life-as-art programs. Thus, the Parnassian way of depicting Egypt in an "objective" and egyptologically correct manner was replaced with an egocentric perspective where authorial "ego" tended to overshadow Egypt itself.
Part two, "Mikhail Kuzmin's Alexandrian Poetics", is devoted to a close reading of works by Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), a major Silver Age figure, still underinvestigated. It opens with an annotation to Kuzmin's early masterpiece "Alexandrian Songs" (1904-1908). They were written as songs (Kuzmin at the time pursued an artistic career of composer and librettist) and performed with piano accompaniment, which largely accounted for their immediate success. They were also remarkable for the way they appointedly avoided the stereotypes of the Egyptian topos. Moreover, by ingeniously blending historical settings with emotional investment, ancient wisdom with homosexual (as well as heterosexual) love, hedonistic motifs with those of Kuzmin's personal drama (sudden death of his beloved, an officer, after their voyage to Egypt and Kuzmin's suicidal moods caused by the inner conflict between his Christianity and homosexuality), "Alexandrian Songs" created an original literary perception of Egypt. Their success encouraged Kuzmin to embark on a new artistic career, that of a writer.
Kuzmin kept resorting to Alexandrian poetics, as his style changed from "beautifully clear" to obscure and parabolic and when he sought spiritual resurrection. Thus, in his later poetry many of the same "Alexandrian" plots, scenes and metaphors appeared rewritten in different modes (in poems about Alexander the Great, Sophia, Gnostics, the poet's own voyage to Egypt etc.).
The analysis of Kuzmin's "Alexandrian" poetry bearing on its semantics, structure and intertextuality takes into account his prose, dramas and operas. New interpretations of more that fifty representative texts prove that there is no rupture between Kuzmin's early "clarity" (which can be regarded as primal chaos put in order) and later "obscurity" (which sometimes only looks like chaos, but turns out to be a puzzle with a key).
Appendix I is an anthology of Russian "Egyptian poems" numbering 200. They are discussed in detail in Part One, Chapter II, and are sporadically mentioned in Part Two.
Appendix II is a collection of Russian poems on the topos of "Sophia... Eternal Feminine... Beautiful Lady". They are prefaced with an essay on the way Russian Symbolists modified European models by converting Sophia into a religion of sorts, codifying the language and plots used and obscuring the meaning of their texts for profane readers. This Appendix serves as a point of reference for Kuzmin's poetic cycle "Sophia", which breaks many Symbolists' taboos and offers a more refined, Gnostic, version of the myth.
Appendix III collects Russian poems about the Star of love/ Venus/ Aphrodite serving as an intertextual background for Kuzmin's poem "The Star of Aphrodite".
Appendix IV contains Kuzmin's own original music for "Alexandrian Songs".
Appendix V is a metrical comment to the cycle "Sophia" written by academician M.L. Gasparov.
The monograph targets wide readership, from scholars with a professional interest in egyptomania, Russian philology and Russian appropriation of European models to layman lovers of Russian literature.
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Academic Studies Press recently published two works by our faculty: Thomas Seifrid's A Companion to Andrei Platonov's "The Foundation Pit"; and Marcus Levitt's translation of Viktor Zhivov, Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia.
