Bøger udgivet af Academic Studies Press

Women have participated in war throughout history, but their experience in Russia during the First World War was truly exceptional. Between the war's beginning and the October Revolution of 1917, approximately 6,000 women answered their country's call as the army was faced with insubordination and desertion in the ranks while the provisional government prepared for a new offensive. These courageous women became media stars throughout Europe and America, but were brushed aside by Soviet chroniclers and until now have been largely neglected by history.

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and motion pictures, among other technological advances, proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, speed transformed contemporary reality, generating new possibilities not only for everyday existence, but also for modernist culture. From Manhattan to Milan to Moscow, the rise of modernism coincided with a precipitous acceleration in the pace of human experience that may artists celebrated. Speed was soon aestheticized and converted from an ordinary, physical concept into a unique source of inspiration. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia's avant-garde movement with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for its revolutionary experimentation. Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930 presents a detailed examination of the ideas and images of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, painting, and cinema. In probing this cultural phenomenon, which began in the early 1910s and continued to the late 1920s when formal innovation in the arts was overtaken by Stalin's Five-Year Plans for rapid Soviet industrialization, Fast Forward explores how the idea of speed propelled the nation's arts toward abstraction as well as toward the ideal of a dynamic, streamlined future. Speed, used as a powerful conceptual means for breaking down the figurative stasis of traditional representational art, provided the basis for a comprehensive reevaluation of everyday reality. Fostering a broad understanding of velocity, Russian avant-garde poets, painters, and filmmakers raced to establish a new artistic and social reality.

A team of University of Toronto sociologists examined Fyodor Dostoyevsky's life to determine the origins of his gambling addiction and draw interesting parallels with the experience of modern day gamblers that they interviewed and took bibliographical accounts from in their study of Toronto area residents.

In this sweeping study, Julie Hessler traces the invention and evolution of socialist trade, the progressive constriction of private trade, and the development of consumer habits from the 1917 revolution to Stalin's death in 1953. The book places trade and consumption in the context of debilitating economic crises. Although Soviet leaders, and above all, Stalin, identified socialism with the modernization of retailing and the elimination of most private transactions, these goals conflicted with the economic dynamics that produced shortages and with the government's bureaucratic, repressive, and socially discriminatory political culture.

The 12th volume of the Archive opens with a study by Yefim Melamed (Kyiv) on the history of Stalinist secret services' surveillance of Jewish writers in the late 1930s and early 1950s, which resulted in repression and the physical destruction of many of them. In the appendix to his article, a unique material is published - reports of a secret agent who reported on the activities of the fellow-writers: Grigory Khan (Moscow) makes another contribution to the study of the ""endless"" topic: the Jews and the Russian revolution. His research is dedicated to Aaron Zundelevich (1852-1923), a prominent figure in the narodnik movement, a member of the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya organization (lit. People's Will). Roberta de Giorgi (Udine, Italy) devoted her extensive research to the history of translations and publication of Leo Tolstoy's Three Tales, which, at the request of Sholom Aleichem, gave him for publication in a collection in favor of the Jews who suffered from the pogrom in Chișinău. The story turned out to be extremely intricate and fascinating, and it adds additional touches to the biography of Leo Tolstoy, Sholom Aleichem, as well as to the history of literary life and publishing in the early twentieth century. Maria Gulakova (St. Petersburg) publishes a letter from the ethnographer and public figure Moses Krol (1862-1942) to Chaim Zhitlowsky. Information contained in a letter from Krol (then an émigré in Paris) dated March 26, 1936, sheds light on a little-known attempt to organize the resettlement of European Jews in the 1930s in Ecuador. The published materials are based on documents extracted from various archives in Moscow, Kyiv, New York, Jerusalem and Leeds.

The book includes interpretations that offer an alternative reading of Nabokov's texts, looking for the inner connections of the writer's oeuvre, in the microstructures of motifs, nodes, and patterns. The concept of the erotext, combining the bliss of the textual and the sexual detaches analyses from reading literature as a copy of life. Nabokov's paths of initiation lead the reader to transcend boundaries: facets of Ego and of imaginary norms, the limits of space and time, to the threshold of the otherworldly -- towards ecstasy. Being a polyglot writer with synaesthesia, he savored words, knew their physics and music, visualized word forms, blended hybrid languages. By indulging in associations, he brought things to life, and exposed the vulgarity of 'Communazist clowns'. Shifts reveal hidden layers, maintain tensions, and create new qualities. This shift can be understood in terms of the identity in the crisis of exile, multilinguality and synesthesia of the author, the provocation of ethics and eroticism, mirroring multiplications and dreams, and the loosening of the role of the author. In the shifts shattering the foundations of normativity Nabokov, the forerunner of the Postmodern is revealed.

The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century: challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.

Russia's provinces have long held a prominent place in the nation's cultural imagination. Lyudmila Parts looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture, addressing notions of nationalism, authenticity, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postimperial identity. Surveying a largely unexplored body of Russian journalism, literature, and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Parts finds that the harshest portrayals of the provinces arise within "high" culture. Popular culture, however, has increasingly turned from the newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow to celebrate the hinterlands as repositories of national traditions and moral strength. This change, she argues, has directed debate about Russia's identity away from its loss of imperial might and global prestige and toward a hermetic national identity based on the opposition of "us vs. us" rather than "us vs. them." She offers an intriguing analysis of the contemporary debate over what it means to be Russian and where "true" Russians reside.

Club Red is a sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika, part of the regime's effort to transform the poor and often illiterate citizenry into new Soviet men and women. Koenker emphasizes the development over time of a distinctive blend of purpose and pleasure in Soviet vacation policy and practice, and she explores a fundamental paradox: a state committed to the idea of the collective found itself promoting a vacation policy that increasingly encouraged individual autonomy. While Koenker focuses primarily on Soviet domestic vacation travel, she also notes the decisive impact of travel abroad (mostly to other socialist countries), which shaped new worldviews, created new consumer desires, and transformed Soviet vacation practices.

A wide-ranging study of empire, religious prophecy, and nationalism in literature, Russia's Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890-1940 provides the first examination of Russia's self-identification with Rome during a period that encompassed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state. Analyzing Rome-related texts by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Aleksandr Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Mikhail Bulgakov, Judith Kalb argues that the myth of Russia as the "Third Rome" was resurrected to create an enduring Rome-based discourse of Russian national identity. Russia's Rome fills a gap in both Russian studies and scholarship on the classical tradition, providing valuable material for scholars of Russian culture and history, classicists, and readers interested in the classical heritage.

This book analyzes how literary fiction depicts multilingual worlds by incorporating multiple languages into the text. Taking as case studies several contemporary novels as well as Leo Tolstoy's nineteenth-century classic War and Peace, it explores how reading becomes a translingual process.

I. Pulner's dissertation, Jewish Wedding Ceremonies (1940), features an impressive volume of field ethnographic materials. Unfortunately, Pulner never got a chance to either defend or publish his work: he passed away in besieged Leningrad. The researcher's text is supplemented by articles on his life and his dissertation, I. Pulner as the Researcher by D. Yalen and Pulner's Papers in the Russian Ethnographic Museum by A. Ivanov, as well as musicological essay Music of the Ashkenazi Wedding: Terra Incognita contributed by E. Hazdan and the article Jewish Wedding Ceremonies in Podolia and Bessarabia by V. Dymshits, based on the insights gained during the recent expeditions.

This is a detailed study of the development of the Russian small arms industry. Humiliated in the Crimean War, Russia turned to the United States for help. Using archival sources, Bradley, author of Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Univ. of California Pr., 1985), describes the role of famous gunsmiths like Colt, Smith, and Wesson; they provided Russia with machinery, tools, production techniques, and even workers to build an independent arms industry. Assimilation was only partially successful; an inflexible economy hindered military modernization. A 30-page bibliography and 40 pages of footnotes testify to Bradley's meticulous research and academic style. Recommended for specialists.

Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science,by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov's scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions

From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and Harry Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, Hasegawa brings to light the real reasons Japan surrendered. From Washington to Moscow to Tokyo and back again, he shows us a high-stakes diplomatic game as Truman and Stalin sought to outmaneuver each other in forcing Japan's surrender; as Stalin dangled mediation offers to Japan while secretly preparing to fight in the Pacific; as Tokyo peace advocates desperately tried to stave off a war party determined to mount a last-ditch defense; and as the Americans struggled to balance their competing interests of ending the war with Japan and preventing the Soviets from expanding into the Pacific.

The path to modernity was late in Russia, and as the country, absorbing western thought and art at a gallop, hurried to catch up in the nineteenth century, it produced cultural content about the modern individual unmatched in any other society. While in the process of creating Russian psychological prose in its mature form, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy converse through their texts. Behind the scenes, they criticize each other, but also grow their own prose in response to each other. Through close readings and other means, this book lays bare conversations about childhood, evil, and other themes. All three writers explore how self-examination changes us and has negative as well as positive effects.

Catherine Evtuhov resurrects the brilliant and contradictory currents of turn-of-the-century Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg through an intellectual biography of Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), one of the central figures of the Silver Age. The son of a provincial priest, Bulgakov served first as one of Russia's most original and influential interpreters of Marx, and then went on to become the century's most important theologian of the Orthodox faith. As Evtuhov recounts the story of Bulgakov's spiritual evolution, she traces the impact of seemingly opposed philosophical and religious world views on one another and on the course of political events. In the first comprehensive analysis of Bulgakov's most important religious-philosophical work, Philosophy of Economy, Evtuhov identifies a "perceptual revolution" in Russian thinking about economy, a significant contribution to European modernist thought which both shaped and grew out of contemporary debates over land reforms. She reconstructs Bulgakov's vision of an Orthodox, constitutional Russia, shows how he tried to put it into practice in the wake of the February Revolution, and demonstrates its importance for a large and influential portion of Russian society.

Barbara Walker examines the Russian literary circle, a feature of Russian intellectual and cultural life from tsarist times into the early Soviet period, through the life story of one of its liveliest and most adored figures, the poet Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932). From 1911 until his death, Voloshin led a circle in the Crimean village of Koktebel' that was a haven for such literary luminaries as Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Drawing upon the anthropological theories of Victor Turner, Walker depicts the literary circle of late Imperial Russia as a contradictory mix of idealism and "communitas," on the one hand, and traditional Russian patterns of patronage and networking, on the other. While detailing the colorful history of Voloshinov's circle in the pre- and postrevolutionary decades, the book demonstrates that the literary circle and its leaders played a key role in integrating the intelligentsia into the emerging ethos of the Soviet state.

Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe-one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture.

End of Days is an Israeli Orthodox Jew's attempt to provide a Jewish faith-based alternative to ethnic superiority in Israel, and a theological political framework for those wishing to promote equality in Israel and Palestine.

Krzemien's book delves into the life of Solomon Dubno (1738?1813), a devout Polish Jew who was pivotal to Moses Mendelssohn's project of translating the Bible into German. It explores Dubno's role, his library's influence, and his poetic endeavors to showcase the beauty of Hebrew. The work offers a nuanced image of the early Haskalah movement.

End of Days is an Israeli Orthodox Jew's attempt to provide a Jewish faith-based alternative to ethnic superiority in Israel, and a theological political framework for those wishing to promote equality in Israel and Palestine.

This is the first volume to reconstruct and examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives (intellectual history; literary history and theory; comparative literature; translation studies; diaspora studies); the book is a vital contribution to current debates on world literature in and beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies.

This book explores the various rationales offered by Jewish groups in late antiquity for the authority of the Divine Law. While Second Temple groups tended to look towards philosophy or metaphysics to justify the Divine Law's authority, the tannaim formulated legal arguments. These arguments link to a set of issues regarding the tannaim's conception of Divine Law and of Israel's election.

Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction confronts the anti-Polonism deeply embedded among American Jews and Poland's enduring relationship with antisemitism. With two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths, and approaches this relationship anew.

This book demonstrates how the Russian thought and literature of the 18th ? 19th centuries influenced Jewish thought and Hebrew literature. Absorption of ideological influences is a universal phenomenon that is instrumental to progress and cultural development, and it is accepted in Jewish culture as well.

Jewish Culture and Creativity honors the wide-ranging scholarship of Prof. Michael Fishbane with contributions of his students on subjects that cover the gamut of Jewish studies, from biblical and rabbinic literature to medieval and modern Jewish culture, and concluding with case studies of the creative application of Prof. Fishbane's thought and theology in contemporary Jewish life. The innovative scholarship represented in this volume offers critical new perspectives from antiquity to contemporary Judaism and will serve as a stimulus for new directions in and beyond the field of Jewish studies.

Polish-Jewish Re-Remembering addresses Polish-Jewish relations, including the impact of Jews on the development of national culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their presence in social life, and relations between Jews and non-Jews. The book consists of nineteenth chapters on Polish, Jewish and Polish-Jewish Literature from the interwar period to the early twenty-first century.