Böcker av Andrew Baruch Wachtel

More than any other art form, literature defined Eastern Europe as a cultural and political entity in the second half of the twentieth century. Although often persecuted by the state, East European writers' voices were heard and revered inside and outside their countries. This study considers the effects of the end of communism on such writers.

This work explores the role of literature in the former Yugoslavia's attempts to create a multicultural nation. It focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state.

Providing a theoretical paradigm for understanding the relationship of history and literature in Russia, this book traces how major Russian writers of the past 200 years defined the nation's past through creating fictional and non-fictional works on historical themes.

For most English-speaking readers, Russian literature consists of a small number of individual writers - nineteenth-century masters such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev - or a few well-known works - Chekhov's plays, Brodsky's poems, and perhaps Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago from the twentieth century.

Expectation is an integral part of the reading experience. Drama is a particularly rich and rewarding field for studying the complex ways in which such expectations are created. This book explores these expectations through the lens of twentieth-century Russian drama.