What role did classical Graeco-Roman culture play in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian society, on the institutional level as well as in the lives of individual Russian intellectuals? Through a series of case-studies of classics-in-action the book illustrates the tension between aims and results, expectations and achievements.

The author shows how the history of the classical tradition in Russia cannot be separated from the history of Russia's orientation to Western Europe in general. His book, based on many little-known and previously unexplored Russian materials, is the result of the first comprehensive research on the study of the Greek and Roman classics in Russia, and its sociocultural —utopian as well as ideological— function within the framework of Russian cultural and intellectual history and Russian educational policy from the accession of Peter the Great to the death of Nicholas I. A tradition does not exist apart from the people who adhere to it and the networks they create in order to ensure some kind of growth and continuity. Therefore the author has ordered his material into an interpretive framework based on a prosopographical approach towards the subject. Among specific writers and poets discussed are Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov and Turgenev.

Translation Classics in Context carefully considers the relationship between translation and the classics. It presents readers with revelatory and insightful case studies that investigate translations produced as part of nexuses of colonial resistance and liberation across Africa and in Ireland; translations of novels and folklore collections that influence not just other fictions, but stage productions and entire historical disciplines; struggles over Ukrainian and Russian literature and how it is shaped and transferred; and the role of the academy and the curriculum in creating notions of classic translations. Along the way it covers oral poetry, saints, scholars, Walter Scott and Jules Verne, not to mention Leo Tolstoy and the Corpse Bride making her way from folklore to Frankenstein and into the world of Disney animation. Contributors are all leading scholars, and the book is accessible and engaging, assuming no specialist knowledge.

A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe is the first comprehensive English ]language study of the reception of classical antiquity in Eastern and Central Europe. This groundbreaking work offers detailed case studies of thirteen countries that are fully contextualized historically, locally, and regionally. The first English-language collection of research and scholarship on Greco-Roman heritage in Eastern and Central Europe Written and edited by an international group of seasoned and up-and-coming scholars with vast subject-matter experience and expertise Essays from leading scholars in the field provide broad insight into the reception of the classical world within specific cultural and geographical areas Discusses the reception of many aspects of Greco-Roman heritage, such as prose/philosophy, poetry, material culture Offers broad and significant insights into the complicated engagement many countries of Eastern and Central Europe have had and continue to have with Greco-Roman antiquity

Presenting a multifaceted portrait of modernist culture in Russia, an array of distinguished scholars shows how artists and writers in the early twentieth century engaged with politics, science, and religion. At a time when many Russian social institutions looked to the past, modernist arts powerfully amplified a gamut of new ideas about individual and collective transformation. Expanding upon prior studies that focus more specifically on literary manifestations of the movement, Reframing Russian Modernism features original research that ranges broadly, from political aesthetics to Darwinism to yoga. These unique complementary perspectives counter reductionism of any kind, integrating the study of Russian modernism into the larger body of humanistic scholarship devoted to modernity.

The Russian reception of the greatest Roman poet, Vergil, provided Russian thinkers with a way in which to define Russian-European features. This volume looks to uncover the nature of Russian reception of Vergil, and argues that the best way to analyse his presence in Russian letters is to view it in the context of the formation and development of Russian national and literary identity. Russian reception of Vergil began to play an integral role in the eighteenth century -- starting with the reforms of Peter the Great -- and continued to be an important point of reference for Russian writers well into the last part of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it took on a spiritual, almost messianic mission, while towards the end of the millennium the post-modernist Vergil of Joseph Brodsky contemplated the fate of a poet in the world. However, Russian reception of Vergil offers significantly more than mere foreign importation or imitation of the beliefs and attitudes towards Vergil developed in Europe. It provides a gateway to understanding Russian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought about national identity and values, and uncovers important sources of later thinking about the character and destiny of Russia. Vergil in Russia reveals that at the centre of Russian reception of Vergil is Russia's challenge to define the character and validity of their own civilization. Vergil's poems, especially the Aeneid, gave Russian men of letters an opportunity to think about and act upon national self-determination in both political and cultural terms.