This is the first ever detailed examination of the life and writings of Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860), an outstanding Russian writer, historian, journalist, philosopher, and theologian, whose biography is explored against the background of his period, rich in famous personalities like Pushkin, Yazykov, Chaadayev, and many others.

The kinetic aspects of human behaviour play a decisive role in oral communication. Our poses and gestures, the way we sit and stand, the way we look at each other and the positions we assume relative to one another are crucial. The author’s main aim in this intriguing monograph is to analyse people and their non-verbal behaviour in the act of communication. Kreidlin focuses on various verbal and non-verbal units, describing the Russian system of gestures and kinetic behaviour. Continually seeking new approaches to this fascinating topic which, in Russia, remains little studied, he bases his arguments on material from the various disciplines which constitute non-verbal semiotics.

The author explores the early years of the creative life of Andrei Bely – one of the most important Russian literary personalities of the 20th century, though he has for a long time been underestimated and his works have become practically unknown to the reading public. The book possesses a great deal of new valuable information about Bely's life and work. It investigates the sources and impulses of the writer's future evolution and establishes a new literary hierarchy within Russian cultural life of the 20th century.

The new book of M. Lipovetsky represents a “dotted line” history of transformation of modernism into postmodernism, and of further mutations of the latter in the post-Soviet culture. According to the researcher, “paralogies”, or, in other words, a mentality beyond the norms and borders of the generally accepted cultural logics, was a stable foundation for that process. Heuristic and esthetic possibilities of “paralogies” of the Russian (post)modernism have been revealed in the book, first of all by means of a thorough analysis of a broad range of the cultural phenomena: from K. Vaginov, O, Mandelstam, D. Kharms and V. Nabokov to Ven. Erofeev, L. Rubinstein, T. Tolstaya and L. Girshovich; from V. Pelevin, V. Sorokin and B. Akunin to G. Bruskin and “The Blue Noses Group”; as well as a range of films and plays of the recent time. At the same time the author has developed a dynamic theory of the Russian postmodernism which allows to include this development in the context of the Russian culture and to determine the meaning of the postmodernist ethics as a necessary phase in the historical development of modernism.

The book looks into the myths which influenced the left radical intelligentsia on the eve of the Russian revolutions. Marina Mogilner is displaying the roots of the myths many of which can be found in the fiction of the period. She examines the books featuring members of underground political organizations, terrorists, revolutionaries, etc., and describes the social functioning of that mythology. She also reveals the links connecting politics with the values and ideals of the radical intellectuals.

This volume includes articles and materials related to the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. Using a wealth of sources, the author attempts to reconstruct artistic life of that period with its bitter arguments and diverse, but mostly failed — hence, little known — projects. Separate chapters cover the history of in Russian painting, the arguments between the Futurists and Pushkinists about the proper design for the poet’s monument, etc. The volume also includes unique drawings and photographs related to Pushkin and his cult.

This is a study of the role that mysticism played in the life and thinking of V.I.I vanov (1866–1949), a poet and a philosopher. The author argues that Ivanov’s worldview was significantly changed both by his personal visionary experiences and by his encounters with A.R. Mintslova, who brought mysticism into the mainstream of Russian Symbolism. Obatnin’s analysis of occult themes in Ivanov’s prose and poetry allows for a deeper understanding of his views on society and politics during the World War I and the Revolution

This book revises Nikolai Chernyshevsky's role in the 19th-century literature and social thought, analyzing the spell that was cast upon society so that it mistook his weak pieces of fiction for an aesthetic and literary breakthrough. The author pays special attention to Chernyshevsky's personality.

This book is a study of suicide, not only as a fact of life and history, but also as a cultural event. The author, a well-known literary scholar, examines medical and historical sources, news items and magazine articles, messages left by suicides before taking their lives, and books of fiction. The study embraces Russia of the late 19th - early 20th centuries.

In this new study of the phenomenon of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pekurovskaya takes a psychoanalytical view of the man’s life and work, demonstrating how his imaginative world was dominated by the secret desire to rewrite and alter his biography through his novels. The study is written in the style of a detective story, interspersed and informed by various ideas from psychoanalysis and psychopathology. By comparing the ideas and phantasms of Dostoevsky with the ideas and phantasms of his interpreters, the author constructs a dialogue with the reader. This new dialectic is not a simple ‘exchange of ideas’, but a model of what might have taken place in the writer’s conscious and subconscious mind when composing his famous works.