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A fully updated new edition of this overview of contemporary Russia and the influence of its Soviet past.
The pioneering film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein is known for the unequalled impact his films have had on the development of cinema. Less is known about his remarkable and extensive writings, which present a continent of ideas about film. Robert Robertson presents a lucid and engaging introduction to a key area of Eisenstein's thought: his ideas about the audiovisual in cinema, which are more pertinent today than ever before. With the advent of digital technology, music and sound now act as independent variables combined with the visual medium to produce a truly audiovisual result. Eisenstein explored in his writings this complex, exciting subject with more depth and originality than any other practitioner, and this is an accessible and original exploration of his ideas. Winner of the Kraszna Krausz Foundations' And/Or Award for Best Moving Image Book of 2009, "Eisenstein on the Audiovisual" is essential reading for students and practitioners of the audiovisual in cinema and related audiovisual forms, including theatre, opera, dance and multimedia.
This comprehensive and original survey of Russian theater in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first encompasses the major productions of directors such as Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Tovostonogov, Dodin, and Liubimov that drew from Russian and world literature. It is based on a close analysis of adaptations of literary works by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Blok, Bulgakov, Sholokhov, Rasputin, Abramov, and many others."The Modern Russian Stage" is the result of more than two decades of research as well as the author's professional experience working with the Russian director Yuri Liubimov in Moscow and London. The book traces the transformation of literary works into the brilliant stagecraft that characterizes Russian theater. It uses the perspective of theater performances to engage all the important movements of modern Russian culture, including modernism, socialist realism, post-moderninsm, and the creative renaissance of the first decades since the Soviet regime's collapse.
Russia has a rich, huge, unwieldy cultural tradition. How to grasp it? This classroom reader is designed to respond to that problem. The literary works selected for inclusion in this anthology introduce the core cultural and historic themes of Russia's civilisation. Each text has resonance throughout the arts - in Rublev's icons, Meyerhold's theatre, Mousorgsky's operas, Prokofiev's symphonies, Fokine's choreography and Kandinsky's paintings. This material is supported by introductions, helpful annotations and bibliographies of resources in all media. The reader is intended for use in courses in Russian literature, culture and civilisation, as well as comparative literature.
This volume explores the interactions of two seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European settlement peoples with Native Americans: German-speaking Moravian Protestants, and French-speaking Roman Catholics. It is among these two European groups that we have some of the richest records of the exchange between early settlers and Native Americans."--BOOK JACKET.
Here are two books in one: an extensive discussion of Western esotericism in relation to the most famous drama of the Russian Silver Age, The Rose and the Cross, along with a new translation of Aleksandr Blok's mysterious play. Blok was inspired by the occult revival that largely defined the Russian Silver Age, and his play dramatizes his replies to the characteristically Gnostic questions ""Who are we? What have we become? Where were we? Whither have we been cast?"" In his comprehensive introduction to and commentary on The Rose and the Cross, Lance Gharavi reveals how Blok, in this highly symbolic drama, drew from the Western esoteric tradition sof Gnosticism, Kabbalism, Hermetism, and alchemy in order to create his own masterwork, here complete with Blok's own annotations.
Expectation is an integral part of the reading experience. As we read a text, we begin to classify it and compare it to others with which it seems to share a family resemblance. Drama is a particularly rich and rewarding field for studying the complex ways in which such expectations are created. Theatre audiences and readers of plays are encouraged in a variety of ways to guess at what might unfold on the stage and on the page, and much of the pleasure of the theatrical experience revolves around this guessing game. Plays of Expectations explores these expectations through the lens of twentieth-century Russian drama. In the operas and plays considered here, dramatists tell stories that, for ...