This is a book about transoceanic voyages, both real and imagined, during the past two centuries. A traveler is searching for the Other, while a writer is telling a story about himself; this double focus results in intricate intertextual games. The focus of this book moves from Utopias to geopolitics, from nostalgia to espionage, from authorship to incest. This study by Etkind changes our understanding of both some key works of the Western literary tradition and some key Russian historical figures. The chapters tell about the impact that sexual experiments in America had on Russian radicals, and a philosopher from Leningrad — on the leading American financiers. Etkind describes his own methodology as the «new historicism,» that brings together intellectual history, political theory and intertextual analysis to lead the author in his travels through various texts, genres, and epochs.

The famous specialist in literature and cultural studies analyses the interaction of culture and religious nonconformism in Russia, especially the utopian consciousness and the lives of Russian sectarians, such as the Khlysts, the Eunuchs, the Dukhobors, the Molokans and others. These sects created original ideas and ways of life; they found their own solutions to the spiritual and social issues, which were in the limelight of public attention at that time.

The book includes articles and features of Lazar Fleishman, a famous literature expert and professor of Stanford University, which have been written during forty years and which have been published in the hard-to-get Russian and foreign publications. The cross-cutting issues of the book are: Pushkin and his time; the poets of symbolism; literature and journalism of the Russian émigrés during the postwar period; and the poorly explored aspects of works and biography of Boris Pasternak. The characters and facts under consideration have been analyzed in the broad context of the literary life. The problems of the literary history have been considered in inseparable connection with discussion of the issues of poetics and style. Most of the works in this collection have been based on the archive research. They introduce a scientific range of new rich materials.

This collection of papers is dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the birth of Vadim E. Vatsuro, an outstanding literary critic, one of the best experts on Russian literature of the Pushkin period. The articles collected here, written by leading Russian and foreign scholars, deal with both theory and history of Russian literature. The book also contains a bibliography of Vatsuro's works.

The eminent philologist examines language as humankinds's environment continuous interaction with it. Gasparov's set aim is to depict language functioning in everyday life through the linguistic behaviour and intuition of its speakers. He works out an approach to language which foregrounds the interminable and indissoluble stream of language operations as well as the corresponding mental efforts, imagery, memories and experiences. The study is focused on the communicative and creative aspects of language activities.

The collection of the most important articles by the outstanding Russian literary scholar, Mikhail Gasparov, offers the first full presentation of the remarkable variety, range and depth of his scolarly interests.

Olesha and Meierhold’s work on the List of Favors show coincided in time with the period of a so-called «big break» in the USSR (1929–1931). This is a story of Olesha’s original idea for this show being twisted and mutilated by the censors. The study is based on the previously unpublished drafts by Olesha (the play’s originally title was Confession), as well as the papers from Meierhold’s archive and transcripts of the bitter «public» debates related to the show. The author offers a number of insights into the life and views of Russian intelligentsia at the time of dramatic shift in Russia history.

In his new book Mikhail Iampolsky, a culturologist and art theorist, studies the transformations and deformations of the visual in the culture of the 19th–20th centuries. The author analyzes various visual effects used by the 20th-century movie-makers, photographers, painters, and writers, that sometimes bridge the gap between physiology and culture. Iampolsky reflects, among others, on Eisenstein’s drawings, movies by A.Sokurov, novels by Poe, Proust, and Nabokov.

This is a study of conflicts and interactions between the linguistic descriptive mechanisms and extralinguistic spatial imagination in the thinking of modern historians. Koposov analyzes the various forms of spatial imagination and the evolution of the «global history» project in the 19th–20th-century historiography; formation and development of such concept as «the social» in the European thought of the 17th–20th centuries; the origins of certain types of thinking peculiar to social sciences.

Nikolai Koposov’s critique is prompted by the current crisis in humanitarian studies. Social science is a product of democratic ideology: thus, the crisis in social studies is closely linked to the crisis in contemporary democratic society. How does this crisis manifest itself? Does social science possess the resources to evolve, or will it be replaced by a new cultural practice? Koposov’s book is a collection of articles and reviews on the history and current state of social studies, historiography in particular. The author focuses especially on the development and disintegration of the present-day system of basic historical concepts.