Suchergebnisse

Key witnesses shed light on an essential part of the history of music. "In the Soviet Union, from 1917 to 1990, in an extremely difficult context, one of terror even, there developed one of the most intense and richest musical environments of the 20th century ...," writes Bruno Monsaingeon. A fascinating mystery that Monsaingeon attempts to elucidate in his film. This essential period of music history is recounted through conductor Guennadi Rojdestvenski, the last remaining representative of these fabulous performers of the Soviet era (he was born in 1931). He is full of humour and it is a treat to watch him explain why there are two page-295's in the biography of Prokofiev published in 1957 and to hear him talk about Tikhon Khrenikov, the terrifying secretary general of the Union of Composers who was in office for forty years ... Other witnesses include the conductor Rudolf Barshai "One day, I said to myself, enough is enough, and I decided to leave", the pianist Viktoria Postnikova: "Even seated in the plane, they could come and fetch you and say, Out!" and the central figure of composer, Dimitri Shostakovich: "If I look back, I only see ashes and bodies."

How did Russian writers respond to linguistic debate in the post-Soviet period? Post-Soviet Russia was a period of linguistic liberalisation, instability and change with varied attempts to regulate and legislate language usage, a time when the language question permeated all spheres of social, cultural and political life. Key topics for debate included the Soviet linguistic legacy, the past and future of Russian, linguistic variation, language policy and linguistic ideologies. This book looks at how these debates featured in literature and illustrates the discussion through six interpretive readings of post-Soviet Russian prose. It analyses both the writers' explicit and implicit responses and in doing so opens up new perspectives for sociolinguistic research on metalanguage. Spanning a number of theoretical fields including language variation, language policy and literary stylistics, Ingunn Lunde provides a coherent way of triangulating these fields by the introduction of the concept of performative metalanguage. The book also offers insight into the role of writers in the broader social and political context of language culture in contemporary Russia and into the various ways in which the linguistic and aesthetic practices of literary art can engage in questions related to the negotiation of linguistic norms. Key Features: Highlights the role of writers, and of fiction, in the language debates of post-Soviet Russia, Looks at the subject from the point of view of literary language, discussing six texts in detail

Known as "the father of Russian Marxism," G.V. Plekhanov (1856-1918) was an outstanding theoretician of prerevolutionary Marxism whose works were relegated to virtual oblivion during the Stalin era. In the wake of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism, his interpretation of Russian history and of the Bolshevik revolution are once again attracting the attention of Russian scholars