The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely divergent political and cultural epochs: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russia. The authors ......
Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Gambler is one of the most profound literary works to treat the phenomenon of gambling with a remarkable depth of psychological analysis and a wide-ranging cultural and philosophical exploration of obsessive behavior, from addictive gambling to erotic passion. This novel delves into the cultural, psychological, and ......
Ritual, Text, and Authority Among Ukraine's Hutsuls
The Stark Carpathians: Ritual, Text, and Authority Among Ukraine's Hutsuls addresses rituals and texts in a small mountainous area located in today's Ukraine. The residents of this remote region are known as the Hutsuls. This book argues that Hutsul rituals and texts, cast as ancient and extraordinary, had more mundane roots. They formed out of ......
This book examines Joseph Stalin's increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues that, in addition to the evil dictator and the Georgian comrade, there is a third portrayal of Stalin--the one projected by the generation ......
Because the Soviet Union loudly proclaimed to be an ideological state, its scholars have rarely scrutinized their ideology as a concept. Instead, they have treated it as a self-evident fact, and proceeded to deliberate the importance of the Marxist-Leninist creed in social life or political decision-making. In the context of the Cold War, such ......
The history of Russian Germans (Russlanddeutsche) is one of intensive mobility across space and time. Today, the descendants of eighteenth-century German-speaking settlers in the Russian Empire live on four continents: Europe, Asia, and North and South America. In this volume, authors from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, and ......
This book is more than timely: no other book offers a comprehensive overview of Russia's fears and challenges to help the American public to understand how Russian domestic policy and foreign policy interact. This in-out aspect is critical to understand the country's international stance and therefore directly US policy and security.
This book is the first social constructionist study of spelling norms and spelling mistakes. Starting from the question of why, in the modern world, misspelling is considered evidence of incompetence, laziness, stupidity, or carelessness, the author traces the origins of such attitudes in German and Russian societies of the nineteenth and early ......
A History of Tatarstan: The Russian Yoke and the Vanishing Tatars surveys the history of the Tatar people living along the Volga river and argues that the Volga Tatars were Russias first colonized people.