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Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin¿s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium.

The majority of Poland's prewar Jewishpopulation managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust in the interior ofthe Soviet Union. This collection of original essays tells the story of morethan 200,000 Polish Jews and offers new insights into their experiences.

This book explores three schools of fascinating, talented, and gifted scholars who absorbed into their thought the Jewish and secular cultures of their respective homelands.

This book introduces the topics of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and social demography in Western art musics and demonstrates their historical and sociological importance. The essays in this book explore the concepts of "e;existential irony"e; and "e;sanctification,"e; which have been mentioned or discussed by music scholars, historians, and musicologists only either in connection with specific composers' works (Shostakovich's, in the case of "e;existential irony"e;) or very parenthetically, merely in passing in the biographies of composers of "e;classical"e; musics. This groundbreaking work illustrates their generality and sociological sources and correlates in contemporary Western art musics.

The Hayei Adam, an abridged code of Jewish law, was written by Rabbi Avraham Danzig (1748-1820) and was first published in 1810. This code spread quickly throughout Europe, and the demand for it required a second publishing which the author printed in 1818. Beyond a Code of Jewish Law attempts to understand the implicit message of its author and discuss various approaches of its writer to both Judaism and Jewish law. While the Hayei Adam without any doubt unveils Rabbi Danzig to be a brilliant rabbinic scholar, with a comprehensive knowledge of Jewish law as well as a coherent and concise system of presentation, it also expresses his great concern for the Jewish community and each individual Jew. Aspects of this concern such as Hasidism, musar, kabbalah, are explored.

The 1983shootdown of KAL 007 and the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident dramatically changedthe Soviet Union in unpredictable ways. The Communist Party, which struggled tomaintain control of political messaging after the KAL crisis, lost control inthe aftermath of Chernobyl.

Wandering in Circles: Venichka's Journey of Redemption in "e;Moskva-Petushki"e; examines the definition of redemption in Venedikt Erofeev's Moskva-Petushki. By placing Erofeev's poema in conversation with other travel narratives from Russia and the West, the book explores the meaning of redemption across societies and cultures, and how Erofeev creates a commentary on the possibility of redemption in a broken political and social system. Through this comparative approach to Moskva-Petushki, this work offers a new reading of the text as a journey of failed social and personal redemption.

The present volume contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the "XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman" at Comenius University Bratislava in 2019. The papers focus on various aspects of gendered experiences during World War II and the Holocaust.

This book examines major Russian TV series focusing on three major issues: Russian television's transition to digital post-broadcast visual economy, Russian television's integration into global television markets and their genre systems, and major shifts in representation of gender and sexuality on television.

This book examines major Russian TV series focusing on three major issues: Russian television's transition to digital post-broadcast visual economy, Russian television's integration into global television markets and their genre systems, and major shifts in representation of gender and sexuality on television.

This diverse collectionof essays explore the unique history of Jews inAmerica and the various ways in which they have definedtheir identities both as Americans and as Jews. The topics ofthe essays range from sports and business to religion andbusiness.

Drawing on a wide range of sources and historiographical material, Between East and West provides a comprehensive analysis of the efforts of the Moscow princes to form a centralized Russian state. According to the author, the unification of Russia around Moscow was not historically inevitable. Tver, Novgorod, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania also claimed this role, and if they had been victorious, a less authoritarian, less autocratic and less despotic Russian state could have emerged. Professor Shaikhutdinov rejects the concept of the "e;Mongol-Tatar yoke"e; and claims that relations between Moscow and Ulus Jochi (Golden Horde) were more complicated and interdependent. The influence of Ulus Jochi on Moscow was especially strong in the political, economic and military spheres, while the religious field was dominated by the influence from Byzantium. The volume discusses in detail the geopolitical aspirations of Russia and the "e;Moscow-Third Rome"e; theory. In sum, the formation of the Moscow state was directly influenced by both internal and external factors, countries of the East and the West.

Goncharov in theTwenty-First Century brings Ivan Goncharov's work into atwenty-first-century critical framework, engaging with approachesfrom post-colonial and queer studies, theories of genre andthe novel, desire, laughter, technology, philosophy, and mobility andtravel.

Martin Vop¿nkäs novel, The Back of Beyond¿Travels with Benjamin, is the story of a middle-aged man, who¿despite his professional success and affluence¿lacks fulfillment. After the tragic death of his wife, he is left alone with his eight-year-old son and quickly realizes that if he wants to succeed in the role of single parent that has suddenly been thrust upon him, he has to change fundamentally. So, he takes his son and sets out on a journey to what he dubs the Back of Beyond. With its unique blend of sensitive and suggestive language this book is a stylistic gem, rendered in seamless translation and appearing here for the first time in English.

Baiba Bi¿ole belongs to the postwar generation of Latvian poets living in exile who reached artistic maturity outside their native country and broke with the older exile generation¿s traditional, nationalistic poetry. In To Taste the River, Bi¿ole's poems are lyrical and personal, often with intense emotion and startling imagery. This is Bi¿ole's first collection of poems in English translation.

Tells a story of movement. Moving from city to city characterized the author's growing up - from Poland to Belgium and from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. The book also moves between past and present, between straightforward story-telling and reflections on memory, politics and religion, and on literature.

Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour: Memories of Soviet Russia traces Yelena Lembersky's childhood in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and '80s. Her life is upended when her family decides to emigrate to America, but instead her mother is charged with a crime and unjustly incarcerated. Told in the dual points of view, this memoir is a clear-eyed look at the reality of life in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, giving us an insider's perspective on the roots of contemporary Russia. It is also a coming-of-age story, heartfelt and funny, a testament to the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters, and the healing power of art.

Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of "e;art"e; production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin's hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin's theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song.The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts--competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement--are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts.Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions--sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology--joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.

Two major dividing lines have formed the megastructure of Eurasia, determining the historical epochs of the continent's peoples. The first, vertical (longitudinal) line has separated East and West since the Paleolithic Age. The East was dominated by Mongol peoples speaking Sino -Tibetan, Manchu-Tungus, and Altaic languages. The Caucasoid peoples of the West spoke mostly Indo-European, Semite, and Finno-Ugric languages. The second line divided the continent horizontally (by latitude) into North and South. This division was closely connected with the Eurasian Steppe Belt. To the north of it lay the world of hunter-gatherers and fishermen. To the south, settled agriculture was dominant. The Steppe Belt itself was the domain of pastoralists, the nomadic and semi-nomadic herders. These lines converged at the entrance to the Great Silk Road. With the swift development of horse domestication and horseback riding, the nomads moved-from the Early Metal Age (500-400 BCE) to Genghis Khan's and the Genghisid's Great Empire (1200-1400 CE)-to the forefront of Eurasian history as their world became increasingly involved in dramatic and sometimes tragic relationships with their southern neighbors. This book focuses on the tangle of problems in these nomadic peoples' history.

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable renaissance in the academic study of the history of the Jews in Great Britain and of their impact upon British history. This title presents essays that reflect the richness of this renaissance.

Based on memories of a native son and the research of a scholar, this book is an amalgam of descriptions and discussions, peppered with conversations, personal observations and an acute observer's reflections, focused on the fabric of life in the city of Lodz and its vicinity.

Deals with the concept of exile on many levels - from the literal to the metaphorical. The book combines analyses of predominantly Jewish authors of Central Europe of the twentieth century who are not usually connected, including Kafka, Kraus, Levi, Lustig, Wiesel, and Frankl.