Bøger i Russian Literature serien

"Perhaps because he is such an unlikely Tolstoyan, Viktor Shklovsky's writing on Tolstoy is always absorbing and often brilliant." Russian Review

"Addendum to a Photo Album" is the saga of the births, deaths, and disappearances within the eccentric Mandrykin family. Following patriarch Malach, a Cossack captain, his wife Annushka, and his many sons all born with sideburns, the novel details their fraught relationships, particularly when sitting for family photographs. Vladislav Otroshenko's flowing sentences and rich metaphorical language describe characters whose concerns embrace the heroic, the metaphysical, and the mundane, as they fulfill their duties as Cossack warriors and family members. Otroshenko draws on his upbringing in Novocherkassk, a city on the Don River, creating a world and a book inhabited with absurdity, filial love, and unusual facial hair.

The novel that reportedly caused a walkout upon publication, this grotesque, absurdist work by Russia's de Sade follows four individuals set upon a common goal of destruction and violence.

Grotesque, deconstructive, and absolutely genius, Vladimir Sorokin's short story collectionDispatches from the District Committee is a revelatory, offbeat portrait of Soviet life beyond thepropaganda and state-sponsored realism.Celebrated-and censored-for its political satire, literary irreverence, and provocative themes,his work has been recognized across the world for its scathing, darkly humorous commentaryon political and cultural oppression in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. Dispatches from the District Committee brings together stories from Sorokin's incendiary 1992collection The First Subotnik/My First Working Saturday. Skillfully translated by Max Lawton,these stories remain subversive classics, and increasingly relevant in a post-truth informationage.

"e;Myths do not flow through the pipes of history,"e; writes Viktor Shklovsky, "e;they change and splinter, they contrast and refute one another. The similar turns out to be dissimilar."e; Published in Moscow in 1970 and appearing in English translation for the first time, Bowstring is a seminal work, in which Shklovsky redefines estrangement (ostranenie) as a device of the literary comparatist-the "e;person out of place,"e; who has turned up in a period where he does not belong and who must search for meaning with a strained sensibility. As Shklovsky experiments with different genres, employing a technique of textual montage, he mixes autobiography, biography, memoir, history, and literary criticism in a book that boldly refutes mechanical repetition, mediocrity, and cultural parochialism in the name of art that dares to be different and innovative. Bowstring is a brilliant and provocative book that spares no one in its unapologetic project to free art from conventionality.