Recent political changes in Central Asia, where the United States is replacing Russia as the dominant power, are having a profound effect on Russian speakers in the region. These people,…

Political positions come and go but talking animals, evil witches, and mythical princesses endure. David MacFadyen argues that Soviet socialist animation between 1936 and 1999 was a fundamentally emotional, not…

Russia’s funniest and most popular films are the work of Èl’dar Riazanov, a director whose light, lyrical tales of love lost and found have garnered audiences of over one hundred…

During this period estrada – which includes comedy, literary readings, and circus arts as well as popular song – saw the birth of tangos, foxtrots, waltzes, and big bands. MacFadyen…

In Estrada?!, the second volume of a three-part series on Russian popular song, David MacFadyen extends his overview of Russian culture and society into the post-Soviet period. Having dispelled several…

MacFadyen focuses on Brodsky’s poetic beginnings. Revising the typical, simplistic representation of the young Brodsky and his peers in Western criticism, he demonstrates that Brodsky and his acquaintances absorbed an…

MacFadyen shows that the works of John Donne, the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and Sestov, and the cities of St Petersburg and Venice inspired in Brodsky a fundamentally Baroque evolution….

The idea of world literature has garnered much attention recently as a discipline that promises to move humanistic study beyond postcolonial theory and antiquated paradigms of “national” literary traditions. In Forget…

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the “Jewish question” for the first time to a broader discussion–one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern…