In Search of Russian Modernism

by Leonid Livak

Overview

A critical reexamination of Russian modernist cultural historiography.

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures by the Modern Language Association

The writing and teaching of Russian literary and cultural history have changed little since the 1980s. In Search of Russian Modernism challenges the basic premises of Russian modernist studies, removing the aura of certainty surrounding the analytical tools at our disposal and suggesting audacious alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking and speaking about Russian and transnational modernism.

Drawing on methodological breakthroughs in Anglo-American new modernist studies, Leonid Livak explores Russian and transnational modernism as a story of a self-identified and self-conscious interpretive community that bestows a range of meanings on human experience. Livak's approach opens modernist studies to integrative and interdisciplinary analysis, including the extension of scholarly inquiry beyond traditional artistic media in order to account for modernism's socioeconomic and institutional history.

Writing with a student audience in mind, Livak presents Russian modernism as a minority culture coexisting with other cultural formations while addressing thorny issues that regularly come up when discussing modernist artifacts. Aiming to open an overdue debate about the academic fields of Russian and transnational modernist studies, this book is also intended for an audience of scholars in comparative literary and cultural studies, specialists in Russian and transnational modernism, and researchers engaged with European cultural historiography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421426426
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	11/30/2018
Series:	Hopkins Studies in Modernism
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Leonid Livak is a professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Anne Tannenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. He is the author of How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism, The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature, and Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France: A Bibliographical Essay.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction. Modernism as a Culture
Chapter 1. The Toponymical Labyrinth of Russian Modernist Culture
Chapter 2. The Errant Compass Rose of Russian Modernist Studies
Chapter 3. Russian Modernism in Time and Space
Chapter 4. Navigating Russia’s Cultures of Modernity
Chapter 5. Russian Modernism in the Cultural Market
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Irina Shevelenko

Livak’s book is a thorough revision of conceptual frameworks that informed the study of Russian literary modernism for decades. By exposing deficiencies of terminological apparatus, chronology, and dominant visions of modernism’s interaction with contemporaneous ideological and aesthetic systems, Livak’s study productively remaps Russian modernism as a subject of scholarly investigation.

From the Publisher

Livak's book, written in a lively and engaging tone, will be a powerful intervention in an important field that is in need of reinvigoration. Each chapter represents a fresh argument. Livak boldly contests long-established prejudices while building impressively on his previous work on Russian emigration.
—Robert Bird, coeditor of Revolution Every Day: A Calendar

Livak’s book is a thorough revision of conceptual frameworks that informed the study of Russian literary modernism for decades. By exposing deficiencies of terminological apparatus, chronology, and dominant visions of modernism’s interaction with contemporaneous ideological and aesthetic systems, Livak’s study productively remaps Russian modernism as a subject of scholarly investigation.
—Irina Shevelenko, author of Modernism as Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic in Russia

Leonid Livak’s book accomplishes two important tasks: it maps the variegated and factionalized world of Russian modernism at home and abroad and, with the concept of 'communities of modernist culture,' it offers a compelling way to overcome the methodological impasse that has bedeviled modernist studies for generations. A double victory.
—Gregory Castle, editor of A History of the Modernist Novel

Robert Bird

Livak's book, written in a lively and engaging tone, will be a powerful intervention in an important field that is in need of reinvigoration. Each chapter represents a fresh argument. Livak boldly contests long-established prejudices while building impressively on his previous work on Russian emigration.

Gregory Castle

Leonid Livak’s book accomplishes two important tasks: it maps the variegated and factionalized world of Russian modernism at home and abroad and, with the concept of 'communities of modernist culture,' it offers a compelling way to overcome the methodological impasse that has bedeviled modernist studies for generations. A double victory.