The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world, each analysing an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. It thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that came to be known as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections betweens Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period.

The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world, each analysing an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. It thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that came to be known as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections betweens Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period.

David Bergelson (1884–1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson’s work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism.

This volume offers insight into Vladimir Nabokov as a reader and a teacher, and sheds new light on the relationship of his views on literary aesthetics to the development of his own oeuvre. The essays included focus on the lectures on European and Russian literature that Nabokov gave at a number of American universities in the years between his arrival in the United States and the publication of Lolita. Nabokov’s treatment of literary masterpieces by Austen, Cervantes, Chekhov, Dickens, Flaubert, Gogol, Kafka, Joyce, Proust and Stevenson is assessed by experts on these authors. Contributors are: Lara Delage-Toriel, Ben Dhooge, Yannicke Chupin, Roy Groen, Luc Herman, Flora Keersmaekers, Arthur Langeveld, Geert Lernout, Vivian Liska, Ilse Logie, Jürgen Pieters, Gerard de Vries.

Premier playwright of modern theater and trailblazer of the short story, Anton Chekhov was also a practising doctor, journalist, writer of comic sketches, philanthropist and activist. This volume provides an accessible guide to Chekhov's multifarious interests and influences, with over 30 succinct chapters covering his rich intellectual milieu and his tumultuous socio-political environment, as well as the legacy of his work in over two centuries of interdisciplinary cultures and media around the world. With a Preface by Cornel West, a chronology and Further Reading list, this collection is the essential guide to Chekhov's writing and the manifold worlds he inhabited.

This book provides the first detailed study in English of the religious philosophy of Vasilii Rozanov, one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of Russia's Silver Age. It examines his subversion of traditional Russian Orthodoxy, including his reverence for the Creation, his focus on the family, and his worship of sex. Rozanov is one of the towering figures of Russian culture, a major influence on thinkers and writers such as Bakhtin, Maiakovskii, and Mandel ́shtam, as well as many European writers. He critiqued Orthodox theology, and wrote extensively on philosophy, literature, and politics, and helped reform marriage and divorce laws. His enormous contribution to Russian thought has been largely neglected, and much of his work has been misunderstood. Ure addresses this by examining the basis of Rozanov's religious philosophy, the Creation of the Earth and the Book of Genesis.