Relations between the Russian nobility and the state underwent a dynamic transformation during the roughly one hundred-year period encompassing the reign of Catherine II (1762–1796) and ending with the Great Reforms initiated by Alexander II. This period also saw the gradual appearance, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, of a novelistic tradition that depicted the Russian society of its day. In Noble Subjects, Bella Grigoryan examines the rise of the Russian novel in relation to the political, legal, and social definitions that accrued to the nobility as an estate, urging readers to rethink the cultural and political origins of the genre. By examining works by Novikov, Karamzin, Pushkin, Bulgarin, Gogol, Goncharov, Aksakov, and Tolstoy alongside a selection of extra-literary sources (including mainstream periodicals, farming treatises, and domestic and conduct manuals), Grigoryan establishes links between the rise of the Russian novel and a broad-ranging interest in the figure of the male landowner in Russian public discourse. Noble Subjects traces the routes by which the rhetorical construction of the male landowner as an imperial subject and citizen produced a contested site of political, socio-cultural, and affective investment in the Russian cultural imagination. This interdisciplinary study reveals how the Russian novel developed, in part, as a carrier of a masculine domestic ideology. It will appeal to scholars and students of Russian history and literature.

This book is intended to capture the interest of anyone who has been attracted to Russian culture through the greats of Russian literature, either through the texts themselves, or encountering them in the cinema, or opera. Rather than a conventional chronology of Russian literature, the book will explore the place and importance of literature of all sorts in Russian culture. How and when did a Russian national literature come into being? What shaped its creation? How have the Russians regarded their literary language? The book will uses the figure of Pushkin, 'the Russian Shakespeare' as a recurring example as his work influenced every Russian writer who came after hime, whether poets or novelists. It will look at such questions as why Russian writers are venerated, how they've been interpreted inside Russia and beyond, and the influences of such things as the folk tale tradition, orthodox religion, and the West ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Many Russian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made a huge impact, not only inside the boundaries of their own country but across the western world. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of these novels, in fourteen newly-commissioned essays by prominent European and North American scholars. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philosophy; the romantic, realist and modernist traditions; and technique, gender and theory. In this context the work of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, among others, is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading; all quotations are in English. This volume will be invaluable not only for students and scholars but for anyone interested in the Russian novel.

“I am Moscow’s underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town,” says Mbobo, the precocious twelve-year-old narrator of Hamid Ismailov’s The Underground. Born from a Siberian woman and an African athlete competing in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo navigates the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the Soviet Union in the years before its collapse, guided only by the Moscow subway system. Named one of the "ten best Russian novels of the 21st Century" (Continent Magazine), The Underground is Ismailov’s haunting tour of the Soviet capital, on the surface and beneath. Though deeply engaged with great Russian authors of the past—Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, and, above all, Pushkin—Ismailov is an emerging master of Russian writing that reflects the country’s diversity today. Reviews "Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground." —Literary Review "The dream of grandeur is more than justified by the artfulness of The Underground, which...create[s] the motifs of blackness, subterranean movement, and isolation that are the novel’s strongest effects." —Transitions Online Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist, writer, and translator who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 for the United Kingdom, where he now works for the BBC World Service. His works are still banned in Uzbekistan. His writing has been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, English, and other languages. He is the author of novels including Sobranie Utonchyonnyh, Le Vagabond Flamboyant, Two Lost to Life, The Railway, The Underground, A Poet and Bin-Laden and The Dead Lake; poetry collections including Sad (Garden) and Pustynya (Desert); and books of visual poetry Post Faustum and Kniga Otsutstvi. Carol Ermakova studied German and Russian language and literature and holds an MA in translation from Bath University. She first visited Russia in 1991. More recently, Ermakova spent two years in Moscow working as a teacher and translator. Carol currently lives in the North Pennines and works as a freelance translator.

Offers a rereading of the Russian realist novel and proposes a hybrid genre, grotesque realism, to describe changes during the post-Reform era.

Poetry. The phrase 'Russian novel' suggests thickness, density, and richness. All those terms apply to Cantwell's poetry or, more precisely, to the life in the poems. These are active pieces that plunge into the thick of things and pulse with motion, regardless of whether the setting is past or present. They show as they describe or recollect, and they don't recollect in any apparent tranquility or with regret. 'A late cousin speaks, ' walking and talking the life of addiction--the needle, coffee, cannabis, the white rock--that culminates in the recognition of happiness, however sordid, however self-isolating. Old friends reconnect at a convention's hotel bar, last to be seated and staying so far beyond closing that the management gives them an unsubtle hint, 'and yet we linger.' Three poems realize incidents from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a big paragraph of which is this book's epigraph. Poems on the deaths of artists and friends, even when they're very long gone, indeed--see 'Marlowe in Italy'--hail their subjects' follies and vices equally with their achievements. This is poetry teeming with light, darkness, color, movement, heat, cold, sound, and silence. Reading it is like watching a complicated, demanding movie or, in full consciousness, life--Ray Olson, Booklist

From the author of Midnight in St. Petersburg and Portrait of an Unknown Woman comes a novel of love, art, music and family secrets set amongst the Russian emigre community of Paris in 1937 Evie, a rebellious young American, leaves New York in search of art and adventure in jazz-age Paris, where her bohemian grandmother, long estranged from the rest of the family, lives. But her grandmother’s sudden death just after her arrival leaves Evie compelled to carry out her relative’s dying wish: to find a man from her past known only as Zhenya. The quest leads Evie deep into the heart of the Russian emigre community of Paris. With the world on the brink of war, she becomes embroiled in murder plots, conspiracies and illicit love affairs as White faces Red Russian, and nothing is as it seems. With Jean, a liberal Russian refugee connected to her grandmother’s circle, by her side, Evie seems to have finally found the passion and excitement she’s yearned for all her life. But is she any nearer to discovering the identity of the mysterious Zhenya or the heartbreak of her grandmother’s past?