Böcker utgivna av Academic Studies Press

This is a detailed study of the development of the Russian small arms industry. Humiliated in the Crimean War, Russia turned to the United States for help. Using archival sources, Bradley, author of Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Univ. of California Pr., 1985), describes the role of famous gunsmiths like Colt, Smith, and Wesson; they provided Russia with machinery, tools, production techniques, and even workers to build an independent arms industry. Assimilation was only partially successful; an inflexible economy hindered military modernization. A 30-page bibliography and 40 pages of footnotes testify to Bradley's meticulous research and academic style. Recommended for specialists.

Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science,by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov's scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions

From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and Harry Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, Hasegawa brings to light the real reasons Japan surrendered. From Washington to Moscow to Tokyo and back again, he shows us a high-stakes diplomatic game as Truman and Stalin sought to outmaneuver each other in forcing Japan's surrender; as Stalin dangled mediation offers to Japan while secretly preparing to fight in the Pacific; as Tokyo peace advocates desperately tried to stave off a war party determined to mount a last-ditch defense; and as the Americans struggled to balance their competing interests of ending the war with Japan and preventing the Soviets from expanding into the Pacific.

The path to modernity was late in Russia, and as the country, absorbing western thought and art at a gallop, hurried to catch up in the nineteenth century, it produced cultural content about the modern individual unmatched in any other society. While in the process of creating Russian psychological prose in its mature form, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy converse through their texts. Behind the scenes, they criticize each other, but also grow their own prose in response to each other. Through close readings and other means, this book lays bare conversations about childhood, evil, and other themes. All three writers explore how self-examination changes us and has negative as well as positive effects.

Catherine Evtuhov resurrects the brilliant and contradictory currents of turn-of-the-century Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg through an intellectual biography of Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), one of the central figures of the Silver Age. The son of a provincial priest, Bulgakov served first as one of Russia's most original and influential interpreters of Marx, and then went on to become the century's most important theologian of the Orthodox faith. As Evtuhov recounts the story of Bulgakov's spiritual evolution, she traces the impact of seemingly opposed philosophical and religious world views on one another and on the course of political events. In the first comprehensive analysis of Bulgakov's most important religious-philosophical work, Philosophy of Economy, Evtuhov identifies a "perceptual revolution" in Russian thinking about economy, a significant contribution to European modernist thought which both shaped and grew out of contemporary debates over land reforms. She reconstructs Bulgakov's vision of an Orthodox, constitutional Russia, shows how he tried to put it into practice in the wake of the February Revolution, and demonstrates its importance for a large and influential portion of Russian society.

Barbara Walker examines the Russian literary circle, a feature of Russian intellectual and cultural life from tsarist times into the early Soviet period, through the life story of one of its liveliest and most adored figures, the poet Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932). From 1911 until his death, Voloshin led a circle in the Crimean village of Koktebel' that was a haven for such literary luminaries as Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Drawing upon the anthropological theories of Victor Turner, Walker depicts the literary circle of late Imperial Russia as a contradictory mix of idealism and "communitas," on the one hand, and traditional Russian patterns of patronage and networking, on the other. While detailing the colorful history of Voloshinov's circle in the pre- and postrevolutionary decades, the book demonstrates that the literary circle and its leaders played a key role in integrating the intelligentsia into the emerging ethos of the Soviet state.

Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe-one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture.

End of Days is an Israeli Orthodox Jew's attempt to provide a Jewish faith-based alternative to ethnic superiority in Israel, and a theological political framework for those wishing to promote equality in Israel and Palestine.

Krzemien's book delves into the life of Solomon Dubno (1738?1813), a devout Polish Jew who was pivotal to Moses Mendelssohn's project of translating the Bible into German. It explores Dubno's role, his library's influence, and his poetic endeavors to showcase the beauty of Hebrew. The work offers a nuanced image of the early Haskalah movement.

End of Days is an Israeli Orthodox Jew's attempt to provide a Jewish faith-based alternative to ethnic superiority in Israel, and a theological political framework for those wishing to promote equality in Israel and Palestine.

This is the first volume to reconstruct and examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives (intellectual history; literary history and theory; comparative literature; translation studies; diaspora studies); the book is a vital contribution to current debates on world literature in and beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies.

This book explores the various rationales offered by Jewish groups in late antiquity for the authority of the Divine Law. While Second Temple groups tended to look towards philosophy or metaphysics to justify the Divine Law's authority, the tannaim formulated legal arguments. These arguments link to a set of issues regarding the tannaim's conception of Divine Law and of Israel's election.

Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction confronts the anti-Polonism deeply embedded among American Jews and Poland's enduring relationship with antisemitism. With two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths, and approaches this relationship anew.

This book demonstrates how the Russian thought and literature of the 18th ? 19th centuries influenced Jewish thought and Hebrew literature. Absorption of ideological influences is a universal phenomenon that is instrumental to progress and cultural development, and it is accepted in Jewish culture as well.

Jewish Culture and Creativity honors the wide-ranging scholarship of Prof. Michael Fishbane with contributions of his students on subjects that cover the gamut of Jewish studies, from biblical and rabbinic literature to medieval and modern Jewish culture, and concluding with case studies of the creative application of Prof. Fishbane's thought and theology in contemporary Jewish life. The innovative scholarship represented in this volume offers critical new perspectives from antiquity to contemporary Judaism and will serve as a stimulus for new directions in and beyond the field of Jewish studies.

Polish-Jewish Re-Remembering addresses Polish-Jewish relations, including the impact of Jews on the development of national culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their presence in social life, and relations between Jews and non-Jews. The book consists of nineteenth chapters on Polish, Jewish and Polish-Jewish Literature from the interwar period to the early twenty-first century.

This book discusses psychological aspects of dehumanization and of the human tendency to dominate, control and potentially murder those considered "less than", or dangerous to the dominant group. It explores how increasingly severe dehumanization resulted in the genocide of six million Jews in the second World War.

This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol's absurdist masterpiece "The Nose." Part I focuses on numerous instances of the writer's wordplay, which is meant to surprise and delight the reader, but which often is lost in English translations. It traces Gogol's descriptions of everyday life in St. Petersburg, familiar to the writer's contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical interpretations of the story in Gogol scholarship from the time of its publication to the present, as well as its connections to the works of Shostakovich, Kafka, Dalí, and Kharms.

This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov--poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.

All Shook Up is the first full-length study to explore how the Soviet government and citizens responded to major disasters. Although traditional disaster studies focus on scientific aspects, All Shook Up looks at political repercussions and social opportunities that emerged after disasters. By juxtaposing the response to earthquakes in the Central Asian republics to nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine, Nigel Raab shows how Soviet citizens not only rebuilt devastated cities but also experimented with new values. After the Tashkent earthquake in 1966, architects experimented with Western design and youth underwent their own version of a sexual revolution. This study of Soviet disasters challenges stereotypical representations of the Soviet Union as a monolithic state.

Deviant Women, first examines the emergence of the discipline of criminology in early Soviet Russia, tracing the development of principles and theories--particularly that of female deviance--and highlighting the ways in which criminologists, a diverse cohort of jurists, doctors, sociologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, statisticians, and forensic experts, conducted innovative social science research under the constraints of Bolshevik ideology. It then turns to criminologists' analyses of female crime, exploring their attitudes concerning sexuality, geography, and class. Concluding with a close study of infanticide, the most "typical" crime committed by women, Deviant Women discusses the social attitudes revealed through the professional discussions of this crime. Throughout, Kowalsky focuses on the position of women in early Soviet society, revealing criminologists' understandings of female crime and how their attitudes helped shape the development of social and behavioral norms in revolutionary Russia.

"Dew on the Grass": The Poetics of Inbetweenness in Chekhov is the first comprehensive and systematic study to focus on the poetic dimensions of Anton Chekhov's prose and drama. Using the concept of "inbetweenness," this book reconceptualizes the central aspects of Chekhov's style, from his use of language to the origins of his artistic worldview. Radislav Lapushin offers a fresh interpretive framework for the analysis of Chekhov's individual works and his ¿uvre as a whole.

The volume combines a narrative of events from 1914-1918 with an overarching argument about the relationship between state failure, social collapse, and decolonization. Imperial Apocalypse provides a readable account of military activity and political change throughout this turbulent period. It argues that the sudden rise of groups seeking national self-determination in the borderlands of the empire was the consequence of state failure, not its cause. At the same time, we see how the destruction of state institutions and the spread of violence led to a collapse of traditional social bonds and the emergence of a more dangerous and militant political atmosphere.

In this richly researched and highly original study, Alexander M. Martin explores conservatism in Russian thought, politics, and culture during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Tracing the indigenous and foreign origins of conservative ideology through a wide range of sources, he shows how the Russians reacted to threats posed by the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and how this reaction shaped state policy and national consciousness. Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries is the first in-depth probe of the origins of Russian conservatism. It will appeal not only to Russian historian but to all readers concerned with political culture and the history of conservative thought.

In early modern Europe, thousands of women were burned as witches during the period of the witch hunts. From the court records of seventeenth-century Russia a very different picture emerges. The great majority of those accused of witchcraft were men. Broadly comparative, Desperate Magic by Valerie Kivelson is the first sustained study of seventeenth-century Russian witch trials. The book uses trial evidence to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history. The routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions raises methodological and moral questions with continuing resonance in the world today. A major finding of this book is that witchcraft was not a marginal practice in early modern Russia. It was practiced by all ranks of society, from serf to tsaritsa at the same time that it was severely condemned and punished. Testimony from these cases lets us see into the emotional lives of illiterate women and men of the Russian past. This analysis shows how the State and relations of power were inscribed into everyday practices, and magic was used as a defense by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world.

The metaphor of an "archipelago" in the Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus was intended to bridge the veil of silence that surrounded the camp system, much like water surrounds enclaves of land. Since then, this deeply influential metaphor has prompted historians and readers alike to think about the GULAG as network of island-camps separated from the rest of the Soviet Union. This book brings together leading international researchers on the history of the GULAG from Russia, Europe, and North America who are advancing both new archival and conceptual findings. Perhaps the book's most unique and suggestive contribution is to consider the GULAG in the context of other camps and systems of internment. Chapters are devoted to the British concentration camps in Africa and India, the tsarist-era exile system in Siberia, Chinese and North Korean reeducation camps, the post-Soviet penal system in the Russian Federation, and the infamous camp system of Nazi Germany. This not only reveals close relatives, antecedents, and descendants of the Soviet GULAG-it sheds light on a frighteningly widespread feature of modernost'.

This study investigates the close correlation between politics and mainstream cinema vividly evidenced in Russian and American screen images of the former Cold War enemy from 1990 to 2005. Whereas glasnost and the demise of the Soviet Union ushered in a period of official cooperation that soon inflated into rhetorical declarations of partnership, the fifteen years under examination saw the gradual deterioration of relations after the initial euphoria, culminating in a partial resumption of mutual Cold War recriminations.

On April 22, 1823, a three-year-old boy named Fedor finished his lunch and went to play outside. Fedor never returned home from his walk. Several days later, a neighbor found his mutilated body drained of blood and repeatedly pierced. In small market towns, where houses were clustered together, residents knew each other on intimate terms, and people gossiped in taverns, courtyards, and streets, even the most trivial bits of news spread like wildfire. It did not take long before rumors emerged that Jews had murdered the little boy. The Velizh Affair reconstructs the lives of Jews and their Christian neighbors caught up in the aftermath of this chilling criminal act. The investigation into Fedor's death resulted in the charging of forty-three Jews with ritual murder, the theft and desecration of church property, and the forcible conversion of three town residents. Drawing on an astonishing number of newly discovered trial records, historian Evgeny Avrutin explores not only the multiple factors that caused fear and conflict in everyday life but also the social and cultural worlds of a multi-ethnic population that had coexisted for hundreds of years. This beautifully crafted book provides an intimate glimpse into small-town life. The case unfolded in a town like any other town in the Russian Empire where lives were closely interwoven, where rivalries and confrontations were part of day-to-day existence, and where the blood libel was part of a well-established belief system.