No detailed description available for "The works of Ivan Bunin".

The essays collected in this book constitute a new contribution to our understanding of the originality and significance of Chekhov’s prose. A close textual analysis of his work is provided, and especially of previously neglected works—some long overdue for in-depth investigation—that Chekhov himself rightfully considered to be masterpieces. Analysis of both these and other previously analyzed works offers a new interpretation which contrasts with those offered by previous Chekhov scholars. Works examined include those dealing with Chekhov’s astonishingly accurate and artistic portrayal of a wide variety of illnesses—without the use of any medical terms. These works are shown to be not mere “clinical studies,” but genuine, impressive works of art. The author, who suffered half of his life from tuberculosis, effectively portrayed many characters afflicted with this disease which was incurable at the time. Many of these works reveal an indisputable symbiosis of the doctor and the artist. Chekhov maintained that “in Goethe the poet lived amicably side by side with the scientist”—a fitting description of him as well. Doctors, the most frequently portrayed characters in Chekhov’s oeuvre are appropriately subjected to extensive analysis, as are the themes of fate and death and dying that figure so prominently in Chekhov’s work. Attention is accorded to imaginative fictional works dealing with philosophy and the theme of crime and punishment, as well as The Island of Sakhalin, a narrative of non-fictional sociological content.

This study establishes Bunin as a modern writer whose images were thoroughly rooted in the 20th century and shows that Bunin's interest in Buddhism was a major influence on his writing.

1. An Introduction to Indian Writing in English, 2. Elements of Short Story, 3. Types of Prose and Prose Style, 4. Prose Devices, 5. Short Stories, 6. Short Stories, 7.Prose, 8. Prose

Hailed as one of the most significant writers in contemporary Russian literature, Sasha Sokolov (1943-) nevertheless remains one of its most hermetic. Despite a considerable scholarly interest in his work, no comprehensive book-length study has yet been published on Sokolov. With the focus on his three main texts, 'School for Fools', 'Between Dog and Wolf' and 'Palisandriia', this groundbreaking monograph is an exploration of Sokolov's aesthetics in which language is shown to embody reality, rather than express it. In her study Elena Kravchenko invites us to examine how language and art affect our perception of the real that, fading away into its reflections, finds its essence. Elena Kravchenko is an independent researcher, whose doctoral thesis (School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, UCL) laid a foundation for this monograph.

Kathleen Parth offers the first comprehensive examination of the controversial literary movement Russian Village Prose. From the 1950s to the decline of the movement in the 1970s, Valentin Rasputin, Fedor Abramov, and other writers drew on "luminous" memories of their rural childhoods to evoke a thousand-year-old pattern of life that was disappearing as they wrote. In their lyrical descriptions of a vanishing world, they expressed nostalgia for Russia's past and fears for the nation's future; they opposed collectivized agriculture, and fought to preserve traditional art and architecture and to protect the environment. Assessing the place of Village Prose in the newly revised canon of twentieth-century Russian literature, Parth maintains that these writers consciously ignored and undermined Socialist Realism, and created the most aesthetically coherent and ideologically important body of published writings to appear in the Soviet Union between Stalin's death and Gorbachev's ascendancy. In the 1970s, Village Prose was seen as moderately nationalist and conservative in spirit. After 1985, however, statements by several of its practitioners caused the movement to be reread as a possible stimulus for chauvinistic, anti-Semitic groups like Pamyat. This important development is treated here with a thorough discussion of all the political implications of these rural narratives. Nevertheless, the center of Parth's work remains her exploration of the parameters that constitute a "code of reading" for works of Village Prose. The appendixes contain a translation and analysis of a particularly fine example of Russian Village Prose--Aleksei Leonov's "Kondyr."

"In his late years, still living in self-imposed exile from the Soviet Union, Bunin sought only to think and write in undisturbed peace. He had won the Nobel Prize and received more accolades than he had ever experienced; now he wished only to divide his time between Paris and his country home in Grasse. But the onset of war in Europe enmeshed Bunin in the tumult and chaos that had marked his first sixty years. Coupled with this disarray were the formidable pressures of his compatriots in "Russia Abroad," the community of exiles who now demanded that he represent the best attributes of "patriarchal" Russia, in his personal deportment as well as his literary activities. A Nobel laureate, he was now also a man-god to his emigre community." "Mr. Marullo draws from letters, diaries, and memoirs to compose a picture of Bunin amidst these times, induding his continued hatred for Soviet leaders as well as for the rising aggression of fascist Germany."--BOOK JACKET.