Pushkin and Romantic Fashion is about the interpenetration of culture and personality, specifically Alexander I's Russian Empire, a latecomer in post-Napoleonic European history, and Aleksandr Pushkin, virtuoso improvisor yet prisoner of the Golden Age discourses that now bear his name. It focuses on Pushkin's use of the Romantic fragment, especially the link between the fragment and Romantic irony's fundamental and modern questioning of the sources and intentionality of language. In the view of such irony's most eloquent formulator, Friedrich Schlegel, "identity" does not precede speech, but is forged in each improvisational interaction with interlocutor or reader. One finds out who one is by speaking, and all utterances and texts stand in a fragmentary, contingent relation to an accumulating life-text. Pushkin may actually come closest of all major European poets to realizing what Schlegel prescribed, or diagnosed, as the poetics of modernity, not because of any direct links, but because as common latecomers on the European cultural scene, Russian and German writers shared a fascination with European fashions and an ironic talent for conflating or stepping outside them. Thus Pushkin's kaleidoscopic explorations of fashionable European genres, from "Augustan" erotic elegy to the archaic Greek lyric fragment, from the Byronic Oriental poetic tale to Shakespearean chronicle drama, from the modern "society tale" to the Walter Scott historical novel, can be seen as ever more dramatic rewritings of and meditations on a previous life-text. This fragmentary and ironic self-presentation has ensured that every generation of Pushkin readers, no matter how gilded with cultural authority the poetbecame, "talked back." The author is deeply concerned to embed Pushkin in a larger European context in a way critically consonant with the best in Western Romantic studies. She locates Pushkin's penchant for fragmentary structures in a European discourse of fragmentation, reveali

Commemorating Pushkin is a study of the fascination with Pushkin that has helped Russian culture define itself, as seen in poems, stories, essays, memoirs, films, museums, and commemorative celebrations.

Pushkin's lyric intelligence is his capacity to transform philosophical and aesthetic ideas into poetry that questions the creative process. This first major study of his lyrics reveals the links between Pushkin's conceptual vocabulary and his intellectual life, and between his writing and the influences of French and English authors and movements.

The book explores the dandy as a cultural type across Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century through the present day. Olga Vainshtein offers a unique view on dandyism as a cultural tradition, based not merely on fashionable attire, but also as a particular lifestyle with specific standards of behaviour, bodily practices and conceptual approaches to dress. The dandy is described as the prototypical hero of the modern cult of celebrities. From clubbing manners, the techniques of virtual aristocratism, urban flâneurs and the correct way to examine people, Vainshtein walks us through optical duels and the techniques of visual assessment at social gatherings. Readers will learn about strategies of subversive behaviour found in practical jokes, the fine art of noble scandal, dry wit, bare-faced impudence and mocking politeness. Looking at dandyism as a nineteenth-century literary movement, Vainshtein examines representation of dandies in fiction. Finally, a large section is devoted to Russian and Soviet dandyism and the dandies of today.

Alexander Pushkin's four compact plays, later known as The Little Tragedies, were written at the height of the author's creative powers, and their influence on many Russian and Western writers cannot be overestimated. Yet Western readers are far more familiar with Pushkin's lyrics, narrative poems, and prose than with his drama. The Little Tragedies have received few translations or scholarly examinations. Setting out to redress this and to reclaim a cornerstone of Pushkin's work, Evodokimova and her distinguished contributors offer the first thorough critical study of these plays. They examine the historical roots and connective themes of the plays, offer close readings, and track the transformation of the works into other genres. This volume includes a significant new translation by James Falen of the plays-"The Covetous Knight," "Mozart and Salieri," "The Stone Guest," and "A Feast in Time of Plague."

Includes the original Russian text and, for the first time, an English translation of that version. “Antony Wood’s translation is fluent and idiomatic; analyses by Dunning et al. are incisive; and the ‘case’ they make is skillfully argued. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. Out of the Dead House rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science. Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read. Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture."