In “Russian Wanderer in the Post-Soviet Space: Homelessness in Ilichevsky’s
Matisse,” Jordan examines Aleksandr Ilichevsky’s conceptualization of homelessness
as a state of existential not belonging that beset the author and his peers when the
Soviet system collapsed in the early 1990s. The novel’s protagonist mitigates his
metaphorical…[Read more]

In his final novel, Virgin Soil (1877), Turgenev takes up the theme of the particular kind of populism (Narodnichestvo) that swept across the European part of Russia in the 1860s and 70s. Critics on both ends of the political spectrum believed that Virgin Soil failed to truthfully depict the populist movement; however, the novel provides an…[Read more]

The paper studies long-term changes in the length of Russian poetry (1750–1921) to reveal the relation of poem length (counted in lines) to a poetic form and its evolution. The research has shown a dramatic decrease in the mean and median poetry lengths during the 19th century. This decrease was followed by the decline in length diversity, which r…[Read more]

Marietta Shaginian’s Soviet production novel, Hydrocentral (Gidrotsentral’), represents a case of canonical limbo. Without exception, the novel is listed as a Soviet literary classic in reference works and compendia of Russian literature since the time of its publication in 1931 up to the present day, and yet is not considered an official exe…[Read more]