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For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the 'mythopoetic thinking' that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of 'erasure' and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their art is increasingly moot. The lichnost (personhood, psychic totality) of the given writer is all-important, argues Bethea, as it is that which combines the specifically biographical and the capaciously mythical in verbal units that speak simultaneously to different planes of being. Pushkin's Evgeny can be one incarnation of the poet himself and an everyman rising up to challenge Peter's new world order; Brodsky can be, all at once, Dante and Mandelstam and himself, the exile paying an Orphic visit to Florence (and, by ghostly association, Leningrad). It is this sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers' lives, that is Bethea's primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea's most memorable previously published essays along with new studies prepared for this occasion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

wonderfully expansive! a sure-fire hit!
in my career teaching slavic mythology to ukranian orphans, i have never come across a book so expansive in breadth. kulikowski deftly displays his vast bibliographical knowledge. page after page is filled with amazing resources, detailed annotations, and funny illustrations. it is a source of great amazement how one human could even have the time to find all of these books, much less be so well versed in them. i distributed this reader to my children at the ukranian ymca last week, and they have been clamoring for more ever since. i sincerely hope that another volume is soon on the horizon. bravo, mr. kulikowski, and encore! encore! encore! ... Read more

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Systematic Presentation of the phonological development of Common Slavic from its formation as a dialect of Indo-European to its final disintegration into into the separate Slavic language. For students in Slavic and Indo-European linguistics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The most intense work on the historical phonology of the Slavonic branch of the IE family
George Y. Shevelov's A PREHISTORY OF SLAVIC, published by Carl Winter of Heidelberg in 1964, is an exhaustive exploration of the phonological changes in the Slavonic languages from Proto-Indo-European to the turn of the second millennium, basically what made the Slavonic languages distinct from surrounding groups, and then what made them West, East or South Slavonic. Shevelov was long a professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University and one of the titans of the field--that this 662-page volume was wrought by him alone might tell you something of his great powers. While a few of its details are now superseded, A PREHISTORY OF SLAVIC is one of the few handbooks of its type and merits close attention from any interested in the history of the Slavonic languages.

The book begins with the Indo-European phonemic system inherited by Common Slavonic. Shevelov was ahead of his time in his embracing of laryngeal theory. From there, Shevelov proceeds in the order that the changes much have happened in, with a careful explanation of the motivations for these changes. For example, the description of how long a and o coalesced into a, while short a and o coalesced into o shows how natural this development was.

Shevelov did not intend his work to represent only universally held opinions about the phonological history, and by his own admission a few conclusions here are his own. The most noticeable perhaps is his believe that the yers as such did not belong to the Common Slavonic phase, and instead of a contrast of full and reduced vowels, CS contrasted short and long vowels. Nonetheless, he makes a good case for this. The only matters here that the student would be well to overlook entirely is the coverage of the Slavonic accent and its connection if any to that of Proto-Indo-European, as over the last forty years much new work has been done.

I would not recommend Shevelov's work as an introduction to the diachrony of Slavonic phonology, as it is a very dense work. Nonetheless, for someone with some basic training in the field A PREHISTORY OF SLAVIC will provide hours of pleasurable reading and answer whatever questions you have about when exactly each of the changes occurred.

The most intense work on the historical phonology of the Slavonic branch of the Indo-European family
George Y. Shevelov's A PREHISTORY OF SLAVIC, published by Carl Winter of Heidelberg in 1964, is an exhaustive exploration of the phonological changes in the Slavonic languages from Proto-Indo-European to the turn of the second millennium, basically what made the Slavonic languages distinct from surrounding groups, and then what made them West, East or South Slavonic. Shevelov was long a professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University and one of the titans of the field--that this 662-page volume was wrought by him alone might tell you something of his great powers. While a few of its details are now superseded, A PREHISTORY OF SLAVIC is one of the few handbooks of its type and merits close attention from any interested in the history of the Slavonic languages.

The book begins with the Indo-European phonemic system inherited by Common Slavonic. Shevelov was ahead of his time in his embracing of laryngeal theory. From there, Shevelov proceeds in the order that the changes much have happened in, with a careful explanation of the motivations for these changes. For example, the description of how long a and o coalesced into a, while short a and o coalesced into o shows how natural this development was.

Shevelov did not intend his work to represent only universally held opinions about the phonological history, and by his own admission a few conclusions here are his own. The most noticeable perhaps is his believe that the yers as such did not belong to the Common Slavonic phase, and instead of a contrast of full and reduced vowels, CS contrasted short and long vowels. Nonetheless, he makes a good case for this. The only matters here that the student would be well to overlook entirely is the coverage of the Slavonic accent and its connection if any to that of Proto-Indo-European, as over the last forty years much new work has been done.

I would not recommend Shevelov's work as an introduction to the diachrony of Slavonic phonology, as it is a very dense work. Nonetheless, for someone with some basic training in the field A PREHISTORY OF SLAVIC will provide hours of pleasurable reading and answer whatever questions you have about when exactly each of the changes occurred. ... Read more

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This book is part of the Our Name in History series, a collection of fascinating facts and statistics, alongside short historical commentary, created to tell the story of previous generations who have shared this name.The information in this book is a compendium of research and data pulled from census records, military records, ships' logs, immigrant and port records, as well as other reputable sources. Topics include:

• Name Meaning and Origin
• Immigration Patterns and Census Detail
• Family Lifestyles
• Military Service History
• Comprehensive Source Guide, for future research

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The last couple of decades have been decisive for Russia not only in the political sphere; the period has also seen the rise and crystallization of Russian postmodernism. The essays, manifestos, and articles gathered here investigate various manifestations of this crucial cultural trend in:Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, offering both a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. A brief but useful "Who's Who in Russian Postmodernism" serves as an appendix. ... Read more

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The role of structural case in syntax is arguably one of the most controversial topics in syntactic theory with important implications for semantic theory. This book focuses on some of the most puzzling case marking patterns in the Slavic languages and ties these patterns to different types of aspectual phenomena, showing that there is after all a pattern in the seeming chaos of case in the Slavic languages.

Kylie Richardson addresses links between the case marking on objects and the event structure of a verb phrase in Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and also shows that the links between case and aspect in the Slavic languages belong to a much larger pattern found in language in general. She also focuses on links between case and grammatical aspect in depictive, predicative participle, and copular constructions in the East Slavic languages.

The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of aspect, and to all Slavicists. ... Read more

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Merezhkovsky's bold claim that "all Russian literature is, to a certain degree, a struggle with the temptation of demonism" is undoubtedly justified. And yet, despite its evident centrality to Russian culture, the unique and fascinating phenomenon of Russian literary demonism has so far received little critical attention. This substantial collection fills the gap. A comprehensive analytical introduction by the editor is follwed by a series of fourteen essays, written by eminent scholars in their fields. The first part explores the main shaping contexts of literary demonism: the Russian Orthodox and folk tradition, the demonization of historical figures, and views of art as intrinsically demonic. The second part traces the development of a literary tradition of demonism in the works of authors ranging from Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Dostoevsky, through to the poets and prose writers of modernism (including Blok, Akhmatova, Bely, Sologub, Rozanov, Zamiatin), and through to the end of the 20th century. ... Read more

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Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse--all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. Toward a Philosophy of the Act will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics. ... Read more

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Dickey divides the Slavic languages into two aspectual groups, an eastern and a western group, as well as a transitional zone between the two. This book shows the semantic meaning of aspect in these groups, analyzed within the framework of cognitive grammar. Dickey offers the first comparative analysis of Slavic aspect treating more than two languages, and the first book-length cognitive linguistic analysis of Slavic aspect. He establishes seven parameters of variation in aspectual usage: repetition, the simple denotation of past actions, the historical present, stage directions and other instructions, performatives and other cases of the coincidence of utterance and action, the imperfective in sequences of actions, and the derivation of verbal nouns. These parameters are used as a basis for dividing the Slavic languages into the western group of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian, the eastern group of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, and the transitional zone of Serbo-Croatian and Polish. ... Read more

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This remarkable work by Ronald D. LeBlanc is the first study to appraise the representation of food and sexuality in the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Meticulously researched and elegantly and accessibly written, Slavic Sins of the Flesh sheds new light on classic literary creations as it examines how authors Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Grigorii Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy used eating in their works as a trope for male sexual desire. The treatment of carnal desire in these renowned works of fiction stimulated a generation of young writers to challenge Russian culture's anti-eroticism, supreme spirituality, and utter disregard for the life of the body, so firmly rooted in centuries of ideological domination by the Orthodox Church. ... Read more

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For nearly fifty years E. Wayles Browne has been a unique and almost irreplaceable intellectual resource for specialists in Slavic linguistics, working on a myriad of topics in a variety of languages and from a range of theoretical perspectives. He has been a subtle yet persistent force in bringing Slavic puzzles to the attention of the larger world of linguists and in defining the larger significance of these puzzles. The present volume brings together a leading cohort of specialists in South Slavic linguistics to celebrate Wayles Browne's body of works in this area. ... Read more