Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon, philosopher, journalist, and scholar, was one of the most original and eccentric Pushkinists of Russia's Silver Age. His eclectic critical judgment was highly esteemed by his generation's best poets and critics, and many of his idiosyncratic interpretations of Pushkin have become canonical. Brian Horowitz's detailed study illuminates both Pushkin's position as a cultural icon of the Silver Age and Gershenzon's role in establishing and challenging that reputation. As Gershenzon's work mirrors both significant and hidden aspects of the Pushkin scholarship of his day, his articulation of Pushkin as the symbolic key to Russian culture reflects the Silver Age nostalgia for and identification with the Golden Age in which Pushkin wrote. This first book-length study of this important figure provides a vivid sense of the inner workings of Russian literary life in the early part of this century.

Editors Joan Grossman and Ruth Rischin pose to their contributors an intriguing question: What happens when the ideas of a thinker like William James, who--despite his originality--was deeply rooted in American traditions, are refracted through a culture that draws on a heritage profoundly different from his own? Including studies of reception and interpretation of James's major works and analyses of the impact of his own philosophy on certain Russian writers and thinkers, William James in Russian Culture reveals striking parallels among and divergences between the intellectual and the spiritual realms.

Translated for the first time in English, Lev Levanda's brilliant coming-of-age story of Russian Jewish students on the cusp of modernity in their struggle against religious chauvinism and an oppressive government. Despite being Russia's best Jewish writer of the nineteenth century, Lev Levanda (1835–1888) is barely known in the English-speaking world, with some of his most famous works, like the 1873 novel Seething Times, having yet to be published in their entirety. Another such work is An Amateur Performance (Reminiscences of a Student in the 1850s), which appears here in English for the first time, translated with elegance by Hugh McLean and edited by Brian Horowitz and Conor Daly. A classic in Russian-Jewish literature from 1882, An Amateur Performance describes the rush by Jews to government schools, secular education, and the lights of enlightenment, while also revealing the struggles of these Jewish students on the cusp of modernity, including keen observations on their lack of preparation, their confusion over the new ideas, and their confrontation with the repressive power of the Russian government. In short, it’s a brilliant sociological study of Russian Jewry in the 1850s as remembered by a writer who fought for progress and Jewish integration.

Metaphysical thought has been excluded from much of the discourse on modern art, especially abstract painting. By connecting ideas about faith with the initiators of abstract painting, Joseph Masheck reveals how an underlying religiosity informed some of our most important abstract painters. Covering Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and El Lissitzky, Masheck shows how 'revealed religion' has been an underlying but fundamental determinant of the thinking and practice of abstract painting from its very originators. He contextualizes their art within some of the historical moments of the early 20th century, including the Russian revolution and the Stalinist period, and explores the appeal of certain themes, such as the Passion of Christ. A radical new theorization of the influence of religion over visual art, Faith in Art asks why metaphysics has been eliminated from the discussion where it might have something to say. This is a new way of thinking about a hundred years of abstract painting.

"Albert Baumgarten presents the biography of one of the most distinguished historians of the Jews in antiquity that demonstrates the important connections between his scholarship, life and times. The events of the twentieth century provide the context for the analysis of Bickerman's scholarly production." --Back cover.

Increasingly, as the production, distribution and audience of films cross national boundaries, film scholars have begun to think in terms of ‘transnational’ rather than national cinema. This book is positioned within the emerging field of transnational cinema, and offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship between transnational cinema and ideology. The book focuses in particular on the complex ways in which religion, identity and cultural myths interact in specific cinematic representations of ideology. Author Milja Radovic approaches the selected films as national, regional products, and then moves on to comparative analysis and discussion of their transnational aspects. This book also addresses the question of whether transnationalism reinforces the nation or not; one of the possible answers to this question may be given through the exploration of the cinema of national states and its transnational aspects. Radovic illustrates the ways in which these issues, represented and framed by films, are transmitted beyond their nation-state borders and local ideologies in which they originated – and questions whether therefore one can have an understanding of transnational cinema as a platform for political dialogue.

This book examines the ways in which scholarly expertise was mobilized during the First World War, and the consequences of this for the inter-connected academic world that had developed in the late nineteenth century. Adopting a strong international approach, the contributors to this volume examine the impact of the War on individuals, institutions, and disciplines, cumulatively demonstrating the strong afterlife of conflict for scholarly practices and academic communities across Europe and North America, in the decades following the cessation of the Great War.