Product Description: This book challenges the belief in the purely linguistic nature of contemporary poetry and offers an interpretation of late twentieth-century Russian poetry as a testimony to the unforeseen annulment of communist reality and its overnight displacement by a completely unfathomable post-totalitarian order...read more

In The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel, Russell Scott Valentino offers pioneering new insights into the historical construction of virtue and its relation to the rapidly shifting economic context in modern Russia. This study illustrates how the traditional virtue ethic, grounded in property-based conceptions of masculine heroism, was eventually displaced by a new commercial ethic that rested upon consensual fantasy. The new economic world destabilized traditional Russian notions of virtue and posed a central question that Russian authors have struggled to answer since the early nineteenth century: How could a self-interested commercial man be incorporated into the Russian context as a socially valuable masculine character?   With chapters on Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky as well as Pasternak and Nabokov, The Woman in the Window argues that Russian authors worked through this question via their depictions of “mixed-up men.” Such characters, according to Valentino, reveal that in a world where social reality and personal identity depend on consensual fantasies, the old masculine figure loses its grounding and can easily drift away. Valentino charts a range of masculine character types thrown off stride by the new commercially inflected world: those who embrace blind confidence, those who are split with doubt or guilt, and those who look for an ideal of steadfastness and purity to keep afloat―a woman in a window.

Product Description: In spite of the incommensurability of the Holocaust and the dropping of the first atomic bombs, the juxtaposition of Auschwitz and Hiroshima has long been a topic of serious debate. While in public memory on both sides of the Iron Curtain Auschwitz and Hiroshima have become icons of industrialized mass murder, comparative research on this iconization has been dominated by decidedly Western perspectives...read more

Product Description: Im Fall der polnischen Literatur aus den Jahren 1914-1920 verbinden sich literarische Texte als Medien des kollektiven Gedachtnisses mit spezifischen Sinnstiftungsstrategien. Kollektiv wichtige Erinnerungsorte werden hier im Zusammenhang mit Machtverhaltnissen, gruppenbezogenen Sinnbedurfnissen und Interessen konstruiert und konstituiert...read more

In graphic novel format, reworks Kafka's tale of family and alienation featuring traveling saleman Gregor Samsa, who awakens in his family home one morning to find himself turned into a giant bug.

Product Description: In Verbindung mit dem Jenaer DFG-Projekt ""Utopie im post-utopischen Zeitalter. Gesellschaftskritik und Gattungsinnovation im zeitgenössischen russischen Roman"" fand im September 2014 an der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena ein internationaler Workshop zum Thema ""Utopie in der Krise? Zeitenwenden und ihre Verarbeitung in slavischen Literaturen des 20...read more

Product Description: Die Heiligen Kyrill und Method spielen durch ihre Bibelübersetzung und die Schaffung eines slawischen (glagolitischen) Alphabets eine herausragende Rolle für die religiöse, kulturelle und nationale Identität der Slawen. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes aus Kultur-, Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft setzen sich mit dem geistigen Erbe der Slawenapostel im 21...read more