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MOSCOW BELIEVES IN TEARS: Russians and Their Movies
by Louis Menashe
This is a collection of essays, reviews, interviews, reports, journal entries, and short takes on Soviet/Russian films which the author, a professor of history, wrote over a span of thirty years, from the last years of the Soviet Union to the first years of the Former Soviet Union. Besides publishing these and other articles in journals and magazines, the author also took part in several film projects about Soviet Russia, most notably as Associate Producer for two award-winning PBS documentaries, In the Shadow of Sakharov and Inside Gorbachev’s U.S.S.R. |
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WE ARE FROM JAZZ: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas V. Galichenko
edited by Megan Swift and Serhy Yekelchyk
This collection of essays offers new research insights on a wide range of scholarly topics, including the cultural mythology of St. Petersburg, movie audiences in Stalin’s time, women’s writing in turn-of-the-century Vienna, musical and literary intertexts in Schubert and Goethe, linguistic features of contemporary Russian word-formation, Jewish themes in Russian poetry and prose, vampire imagery in German and Swiss literature and film, the Croatian emigration in Canada, new perspectives on foreign language acquisition and theatrical elements in Tolstoy’s short fiction. Jazz is an eclectic medium and We’re From Jazz, likewise, offers samples from a broad selection of fascinating cultural material. The collection comes in honor of Nicholas V. Galichenko, a much-respected and beloved teacher of Russian language, literature and film at the University of Victoria. These essays are offered by colleagues and former students of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies. |
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REMEMBERING UTOPIA: The Culture of Everyday Life in Yugoslavia
edited by Breda Luthar and Marusa Pušnik
This collection of essays helps uncover various aspects of everyday life during the time of socialism in Yugoslavia, such as leisure, popular culture, consumption, sociability and power. The essays are based on individual and collective memory or on records of institutionalized discourse and politics. The authors come from a variety of fields, including cultural studies, media studies, social and cultural history, cultural sociology, cultural and social anthropology. The history of socialism lacks close accounts of the texture of life in the margins of society, which include narratives of the feelings, experiences and practices of ordinary people. This book provides them and undermines persisting interpretations of “real” life in socialism, which rely on macro-studies of social structures and on the political and institutional histories of socialism. As such, the book is also an attempt to de-Westernize the discourse on Central/Eastern Europe as Europe’s periphery or its Orient. The culture of memory is evoked either through oral traditions or textual analyses of records of the public discourse. Both facets contribute to a cultural history of the era of socialism in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1980 (Tito’s death). |
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RED STAR, CRESCENT MOON: A Novel
by Robert A. Rosenstone
Telling its story in multiple voices, this novel confronts some of the major cultural and political dilemmas of our time, creating a world of characters caught in webs of historical misunderstanding which lead towards violence. Embedded within the work is a meditation on the meaning of the past, how we depict and remember it, how our histories shape us, how personal and national traditions at once create and limit our identities and our feelings for other human beings and cultures. It is a story of love locked in a struggle with the regressive elements of society that wish to compartmentalize our experiences and drive human beings apart.
Aisha, an Afghan born film director who has lived in the United States for more than a decade, arrives in Spain in 1996 to screen her documentary on Afghans in America at a women’s film festival sponsored by the U.S. State Department. There, she meets Benjamin, a Jewish historian whose book on the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s is being shot on location near Madrid, directed by a major Hollywood star known as the Most Beautiful Man in the World. They fall in love…
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