The book examines the evolution of Pushkin’s poetry and its dialogue with the Russian poetic tradition. Among the topics touched upon in the book are: an encounter between Zhukovsky, Batyushkov and Ivan Barkov in “Ruslan and Ludmila”; parody underlying the text of the “southern” poems; Vladimir Lensky as a pornographic poet and etс.

This is a study of intertextual links between Brodsky’s poetry, on the one hand, and Western European philosophy and Russian poetry, on the other. Ranchin traces some elements of Brodsky’s poetics back to the works of Antiokh Kantemir, Gavriil Derzhavin, Aleksander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others.

This collection of articles and archival materials develops new approaches to the various problems of readership and censorship in Russia in the 19th - 20th centuries.

The author uses the wide variety of sources to describe the social aspects of Russian literary life in the 1820s–1840s. He touches upon such issues as the growth and differentiation of readership, the birth of «mass» literature, the changing literary fashions, emergence of first professional editors, the complex relationship between the writers and censors, etc. Recreating this context helps Reitblat to analyze Pushkin’s literary career and his skillful use of social mechanisms that allowed him to achieve the leading position in Russian literature.

Traditionally, the French have perceived their country as the intellectual centre of the world – the hub where universal values of reason are cultivated. Today, this view is reassessed as increasing numbers of publications from different countries examine the sources, boundaries and prospects of France’s intellectual culture, as well as her place in world thought and writing. The essays in this book explore the status of the French language in culture, the international fate of so-called “new French theory”, the connection between intellectual life and politics, and the intellectual as transmitter of the values of reason in everyday social life. Also included are material from the Russian-French colloquium on Maurice Blanchot, key figure in 20th-century French literature and intellectual culture, and the bibliographic index “French humanitarian thought in Russian translation, 1995 – 2004”.

To this day, dueling summons up images of heroism and glory in the Russian cultural imagination. The book argues that the Russian duel acquired its enduring prestige because it served to define and defend personal autonomy in a hierarchical state that lacked reliable legal guarantees against corporal punishment. Literature carried the Russian duel’s high reputation into the twentieth century and made it available to writers working under the Soviet regime as a means to both register and tacitly protest the totalitarian state’s disregard for individual rights.

The well-known literary critic has devoted his study to an interpretation of secret messages in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The poet's experiences of living within a certain multi-dimensional culture, comprising history, philosophy, religion, literature and art, have made their way into the novel, and Igor Smirnov is striving at decipher the code and penetrate into the depths of meaning inherent in that superior and far from properly elucidated book.

The author re-evaluates and polemically re-establishes the basic notions of Freud's theory and main conceptions of psychoanalysis creating his own highly original and impressive approach to the development of Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This book deals with such well-known literary figures as Casanova, Cagliostro, d’Eon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Tschudi, Fougeret de Monbron, the brothers Zannovich and others, all of whom visited Russia in the 18th centuries. Since these fortune-seekers tended to turn their lives into works of art, their biographies are analyzed as a single text and compared with the narrative patterns of the period. Travelling about social, literary and geographic space, the adventurer temptended society and transforming the world with his utopian proposals.

This study by Dmitry Tokarev is a comparative analysis of two extraordinary writers, Daniil Kharms and Samuel Beckett. The author finds unexpected parallels in their writings, which allow him to have a fresh look on such key concepts of modern aesthetics as «absurd» and «nonsense». In his prose Kharms expressed the same horror in the face of inescapable, amorphous, shapeless, unconscious existence that permeates Beckett’s writings; it is because of this horror that the silence of a blank page and artistic self-destruction become the ultimate literary goal of both authors.