This is the first book-length study of Boris Eikhenbaum (1886-1959), a leading Russian Formalist and a pathbreaking Tolstoy scholar. The author carefully traces Eikhenbaum's intellectual trajectory from his pre-Formalist "philosophical" criticism, through Formalism to his later biographical criticism of Tolstoy and Lermontov. Eikhenbaum's contribution to Formalism has not heretofore received clear definition, and the author shows that his ideas and influence were even greater than previously supposed. His shift away from Formalism, with its emphasis on purely literary analysis, toward a criticism that emphasized the writer as a cultural figure is seen as a response to both political exigency and personal need. Although by the late 1910's Formalism had become poetics non grata in the Soviet Union, the author demonstrates that Eikhenbaum also had compelling intellectual reasons to move away from Formalism, which had reached a dead end. The author asserts that Eikhenbaum prolonged his scholarly life by concentrating on nineteenth-century Russian authors whose moral opposition to mainstream Russian intellectual thought served as a model for his own ethical stance in Stalin's Russia. This is particularly true of his monumental three-volume work on Tolstoy, which in its own way has been as influential as his Formalist writings. Throughout, the author relates Eikhenbaum's critical thinking to such current literary issues as intention, perception, meaning, reader reception, deconstruction, and the New Historicism.

As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian émigré community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet government that followed. However, Charlottengrad embodied a full range of personal and political positions vis-à-vis the Soviet project, from enthusiastic loyalty to questioning ambivalence and pessimistic alienation. By closely examining the intellectual output of Charlottengrad, Roman Utkin explores how community members balanced their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern Western city charged with artistic, philosophical, and sexual freedom. He highlights how Russian authors abroad engaged with Weimar-era cultural energies while sustaining a distinctly Russian perspective on modernist expression, and follows queer Russian artists and writers who, with their German counterparts, charted a continuous evolution in political and cultural attitudes toward both the Weimar and Soviet states. Utkin provides insight into the exile community in Berlin, which, following the collapse of the tsarist government, was one of the earliest to face and collectively process the peculiarly modern problem of statelessness. Charlottengrad analyzes the cultural praxis of “Russia Abroad” in a dynamic Berlin, investigating how these Russian émigrés and exiles navigated what it meant to be Russian—culturally, politically, and institutionally—when the Russia they knew no longer existed.

Do words--their sounds and shapes, their lengths and patterns--imitate the world? Mimology says they do. First argued in Plato's Cratylus more than two thousand years ago, mimology has left an important mark in virtually every major art and artistic theory thereafter. Mimology is the basis of language sciences and incites occasional hilarity. Genette treats matters as basic and staid as the alphabet and as reverberating as the letter R in ur-linguistics. Mimologics bridges mainstream literary history and Genette's expertise in critical method by undertaking an intensive study of the most vexed of literary problems: language as a representation of reality. --From publisher's description.