Where the “Russian soul” and “Russian spirit” are concerned, we know all there is to know – or almost. The “Russian body”, on the other hand, remains a terra incognita hitherto little explored by researchers. Now cultural specialists, literature experts, linguists and ethnographers from Russia, France and the USA are putting forward new approaches to the study of the body both in popular culture, and in literature, art and ballet. The articles in this book address a wide range of topics such as the body as a special system of signs and signals, the language of gesture and its “translatability” into other languages, the body as an object of social control, depiction of the naked body and the “deconstruction” of the body in “Golden” and Silver Age culture.

In a creative lifetime spanning over four decades Fyodor Sologub (1863-1927) produced an extensive literary legacy, a great deal of which is still awaiting publication. He was a distinguished poet and prose writer, a playwright and a theorist of theatrical art. The present book contains Sologub's poems for the period from 1878 up to his death as well as a play The Poisoned Garden, a treatise Dignity and the Measure of Things and Aphorisms. Materials shedding light on the poet's relationship with his wife, Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, memoirs and other texts, provide biographical information.

This book examines Stalin’s literary language as well as the religious and mythological stereotypes ever present in his consciousness. Despite his meagre vocabulary and good-for-nothing style, Stalin created writings texts which display a paradoxically sophisticated semantic system, characterised by the ambiguity and instability of the apparently clear and well-defined notions. The researcher singles out not only Bolshevist mythology, but also a vast layer of folklore (mostly references to the North-Caucasian epics) employed in the former state leader’s publicistic works; he also studies the interconnection between Christian and pagan patterns in them. The materials under investigation are numerous and for the most part never before analysed.

Mikhail Vaiskopf, a renown Israeli student of Russian culture, is the author of numerous monographic studies (Plot in Gogol’s Work, 1993; Speaking Full Voice: Maiakovsky’s Religion, 1997; Stalin the Writer, 2001). This volume includes his research papers on Russian literature from the days of Pushkin to the mid-20th century. Some of these articles are well-known to the Russian audience, the others were published abroad and not easily available in Russia; still others have not been previously published at all.

This well-known expert in cultural and literary studies inspired to examine Daniil Kharms’ style, philosophical sources and cultural context by the seeming transparency and at the same time mysteriousness of the writer’s texts. The devices that early avant-garde authors used to magically transform of reality were employed by Kharms either for denying the very notion of reality or for deconstructing the mimetic qualities of literature. Yampolsky’s reading of Kharms is a creative one “a free movement of thought within the text,” which enables the author to draw important conclusions not only about Kharms’ writings but also about 20th-century art and literature at large.

This book by a well-known scholar contains essays on corporality in culture. It examines different forms of body language, from making faces and laughing to dancing and wandering in the dark. Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Eisenstein, Borges and others are analyzed from this perspective.

Yampolsky’s latest comprehensive work focuses on the metamorphoses of power during the transition from absolute monarchy to democracy. The process of gradual weakening of the magic surrounding the royal body and shifting of power from the monarch’s person to the impersonal structure of relations between subjects is studied within the context of West European history and the period between the late Middle Ages and the French revolution. Yampolsky invites us to examine power through its representations – the forms in which it is presented. The metamorphoses of power are studied within a broad cultural context of philosophy, theatre and politics. The author conducts an in-depth theoretical analysis of phenomena such as symbols, allegory, mimesis and sovereignty, focusing in particular on the sovereign’s exclusion from the community he governs. This exclusion, argues Yampolsky, serves to create a symbolic link between king and executioner, king and Jews, autocrat and animals.

60x90/16, hard cover, ill., 616 pp., 2007
ISBN 5-86793-482-9

«Classical representation is a particular form of perceiving reality. It is based on substituting a certain object with an illusory image». This is the definition given by Mikhail Yampolsky in his new book, a fragmentary history of representation beginning in the Renaissance and ending at the end of the 19th century. The analysis of the attitude to representation in Russian classical culture plays a leading role in the book, especially in the work of Gogol and Leskov. The author examines the question of a specifically Russian critique of the visionary from the perspective of Orthodox theology and explores the poetics of the icon as one of the essential mechanisms of cultural evolution in 19th century Russia. Literature, philosophy and the fine arts are the source material for Yampolsky’s arguments, while the second half of the book is devoted to urbanism and the comparison of two cities — Rome and St. Petersburg. The modern city is examined by the author as a unique model of representation.

A long-term colleague and personal friend of Yury Lotman has combined the life story of the great literary historian, expert in culture and semiotics, the founder and head of the famous Tartu school, with a detailed analysis of his research work. The book also contains Lotman’s memoirs and other materials.

The author is studying the Russian verse of the last three decades, paying particular attention to the linguistic searches and transformations. The poems under investigation belong to a wide variety of authors (namely, about 300), including Genrikh Sapgir, Vladimir Sosnora, Joseph Brodsky, Timur Kibirov, and others.