-
Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters
The life of a human community rests on common experience. Yet in modem life there is an experience common to all that threatens the very basis of community—the experience of exile. No one in the modem world has been spared the encounter with homelessness. Refugees and fugitives, the disillusioned and disenfranchised grow in number every day. Why does it happen? What does it mean? And how are we implicated?
David Patterson responds to these and related questions by examining exile, a primary motif in Russian thought over the last century and a half. By “exile” he means not only a ...Read More
-
Literature And Spirit: Essays on Bakhtin and His Contemporaries
"If Bakhtin is right," Wayne C. Booth has said, "a very great deal of what we western critics have spent our time on is mistaken, or trivial, or both." In Literature and Spirit David Patterson proceeds from the premise that Bakhtin is right.
Exploring Bakhtin's notions of spirit, responsibility, and dialogue, Patterson takes his reader from the narrow arena of literary criticism to the larger realm of human living and human loving. True to the spirit of Bakhtin, he draws the Russian into a vibrant dialogue with other thinkers, including Foucault, Berdyaev, Gide, Lacan, Levinas, and Heidegger. But he does ...Read More
-
Andrey Bely: A Critical Review
Andrey Bely, novelist, essayist, theoretician, critic, and poet, was a central figure in the Russian Symbolist movement of the 1920s, the most important literary movement in Russia in this century. Bely articulated a Symbolist aesthetic and originated a new approach to the study of Russian metrics and versification, giving rise to a new scholarly discipline that still thrives in the West.
Although regarded by some critics, including Vladimir Nabokov, as the author of the greatest Russian novel of this century, Bely has been nearly forgotten in his native country for ideological reasons. In the West he remains little known and ...Read More
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
