Online Primary Sources(Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies, 2021)
The Online Primary Sources database aims to provide researchers and students with sources from Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Eastern and Central Europe put online in recent years thanks to intensive library digitization policies in these zones as well as in the West.
The database is curated by the Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (CERCEC), in Paris (France). CERCEC is a CNRS-EHESS joint research unit. Read more about CERCEC here.
Encounters with Polish Literature is a new video series in English for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. There are more points of contact between Polish writers and North American culture than many readers realize. Consider the long career of Czesław Miłosz at UC Berkeley and on the Bay Area poetry scene, the popularity of Wisława Szymborska in English translation, or the way that New Yorkers found comfort in Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” after 9/11. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb presents a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. Translators will bring us into the delicate process of taking what may be a very personal and individual artistic expression in Polish and rendering it in a way that makes us feel as readers in English that we’ve made a human connection with the author. When possible, the show will bring in living authors to discuss their own work. Students thinking of taking a course in Polish literature or perhaps pursuing an advanced degree in the field, can meet leading scholars in Polish Studies at universities in North America and all around the world. If you are interested in writers like Miłosz, Szymborska, and Zagajewski, as well as prose writers, essayists, novelists, journalists, and more, then Encounters with Polish Literature can be your window into their world and their context.
The New Review Inc. has uploaded a free digital collection of our archival issues – more than 30 old copies of the Noviy Zhurnal in a digital format. The project of digitizing the entire book archive of Noviy Zhurnal / The New Review – over 200 unique copies from 1942 to 2000 - has been started! Please go here (https://newreviewinc.com/archive/) to view.
A key text in the history of gay literature, Wings was published in 1906 to the scandalized reaction of contemporary society and the generations which followed. Its central theme of aestheticized sensuality has drawn comparisons with the work of contemporaries Oscar Wilde and André Gide. The young Vanya Smurov is deeply attached to his mentor, Dr. Larion Stroop, and to the world of Renaissance art which the latter reveals to him. Initially appalled by the sudden discovery of Stroop's homosexual leanings, Vanya abandons him to pursue a "normal" heterosexual existence. In turn disgusted by ensuing encounters, he returns to Dr. Stroop and accompanies him to Italy where he begins his real education—both in the world of art, and that of hedonism.
When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero.
For the first time, The Walls Behind the Curtain presents a collection of works from East European novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists who wrote during or after their captivity under communism. Harold B. Segel paints a backdrop of the political culture and prison and labor camp systems of each country, then offers biographical information on individual writers and presents excerpts of their writing.
Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Slovenian by Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ana Jelnikar. LOOK BACK, LOOK AHEAD is the first American edition of Kosovel's selected poetry. "To read him is like watching Van Gogh's last paintings, to stare at Celan's last drops of life. And yet, he's the threshold, the triumphal arch to this small nation's destiny, the eternal poet of the total existence"--Tomaz Salamun.
Diaboliad and Other Stories is the only complete translation of his first collection of short stories, plus six of his best feuilletons from the 1920s. The targets of Bulgakov's brilliant, dark satires here include the Gogolian bureaucracy that mushroomed after the Revolution, the subjugation of science to the state, and the price to be paid when the new world of Communism clashed with the old order. Everywhere the reader will find Bulgakov's customary exuberance, brilliance, and originality, as well as the distinctive voice that was to achieve full effect in The Master and Margarita.
A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.
Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has – as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn’t his grandson a “writer”?
High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him – Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American – but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.
Slava’s turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a lasting price from his family.
A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.
To learn more about the author, Boris Fishman, please visit his website, and to learn more about A Replacement Life or to read an excerpt, visit the book's webpage.
