For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the “mythopoetic thinking” that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of “erasure” and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their ar ...
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is one of Vladimir Nabokov’s most autobiographical novels and it has often been observed that Sebastian’s passionate affair with the femme fatale Nina Rechnoy is a dramatized extension of Nabokov’s infatuation with Irina Guadanini. In this book it is shown that the novel also conceals another, secluded, love affair Sebastian had with a man, which reflects the main episode in the life of Nabokov’s brother Serge ...
This collective volume aims to highlight the philosophical and literary idea of apocalypse within key examples in the Slavic world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Russian realism to avant-garde painting, from the classic fiction of the nineteenth century to twentieth-century philosophy, not omitting theatre, cinema or music, the concepts of “end of history” and “end of present time” are specifically examined as conditions for ...
This book presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues: with the emerging Soviet Union and ...
