The tale of Boris Godunov―tsar, usurper, tsarecide―dating from the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles, inspired three major nineteenth-century Russian cultural expressions: in history by Nikolai Karamzin, in drama by Alexander Pushkin, and in opera by Modest Musorgsky. Each of these famous creations was a vehicle for generic innovation, in which a specifically Russian concept of genre was asserted in opposition to the reigning European models: German historiography, French melodrama, and Italian opera. Within a Bakhtinian framework, Caryl Emerson explores these three versions of the Boris Tale, the context of their genesis, and their complex interrelationships.

Boris Godunov: Transposition of a Russian Theme (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian & East European Studies (Paperback))

Biographies & Memoirs

Emerson, Caryl

Historical

Indiana University Press

Includes the original Russian text and, for the first time, an English translation of that version. “Antony Wood’s translation is fluent and idiomatic; analyses by Dunning et al. are incisive; and the ‘case’ they make is skillfully argued. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin's Original Comedy (Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies)

Literature & Fiction

Dunning, Chester

Fomichev, Sergei

Lotman, Lidiia

Dramas & Plays

University of Wisconsin Press

Book by Emerson, Caryl, Oldani, Robert William

Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

Oldani, Robert William

Arts & Literature

Cambridge University Press

The Life of Musorgsky (Musical Lives)

This is a brief biography of Russia's greatest musical dramatist, Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881), known the world over for his opera Boris Godunov, for his innovative realistic art songs, and for his pianistic work "Pictures at an Exhibition." Yet during his life Musorgsky had no institutional connections, no "degree," no family of his own, not even a permanent address. This book emphasizes the psychological and economic factors that contributed to the composer's remarkable autodidactic rise and tragic, premature end.

Arts & Photography

Music

Russian literature arrived late on the European scene. Within several generations, its great novelists had shocked - and then conquered - the world. In this introduction to the rich and vibrant Russian tradition, Caryl Emerson weaves a narrative of recurring themes and fascinations across several centuries. Beginning with traditional Russian narratives (saints' lives, folk tales, epic and rogue narratives), the book moves through literary history chronologically and thematically, juxtaposing literary texts from each major period. Detailed attention is given to canonical writers including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, as well as to some current bestsellers from the post-Communist period. Fully accessible to students and readers with no knowledge of Russian, the volume includes a glossary and pronunciation guide of key Russian terms as well as a list of useful secondary works. The book will be of great interest to students of Russian as well as of comparative literature.

The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

History & Criticism

The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Among Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old-fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment of his place in Russian and Western thought, Caryl Emerson brings to light what might be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader: Bakhtin's foundational ideas, forged in the early revolutionary years, yet hardly altered in his lifetime. With the collapse of the Soviet system, a truer sense of Bakhtin's contribution may now be judged in the context of its origins and its contemporary Russian "reclamation" A foremost Bakhtin authority, Caryl Emerson mines extensive Russian sources to explore Bakhtin's reception in Russia, from his earliest publication in 1929 until his death, and his posthumous rediscovery. After a reception-history of Bakhtin's published work, she examines the role of his ideas in the post-Stalinist revival of the Russian literary profession, concentrating on the most provocative rethinkings of three major concepts in his world: dialogue and polyphony; carnival; and "outsideness" a position Bakhtin considered essential to both ethics and aesthetics. Finally, she speculates on the future of Bakhtin's method, which was much more than a tool of criticism: it will "tell you how to teach, write, live, talk, think"

The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin

Princeton University Press

Among Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old-fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment of his place in Russian and Western thought, Caryl Emerson brings to light what might be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader: Bakhtin's foundational ideas, forged in the early revolutionary years, yet hardly altered in his lifetime. With the collapse of the Soviet system, a truer sense of Bakhtin's contribution may now be judged in the context of its origins and its contemporary Russian "reclamation."
 A foremost Bakhtin authority, Caryl Emerson mines extensive Russian sources to explore Bakhtin's reception in Russia, from his earliest publication in 1929 until his death, and his posthumous rediscovery. After a reception-history of Bakhtin's published work, she examines the role of his ideas in the post-Stalinist revival of the Russian literary profession, concentrating on the most provocative rethinkings of three major concepts in his world: dialogue and polyphony; carnival; and "outsideness," a position Bakhtin considered essential to both ethics and aesthetics. Finally, she speculates on the future of Bakhtin's method, which was much more than a tool of criticism: it will "tell you how to teach, write, live, talk, think."

Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concernsSmall wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative process. Unitywith respect not only to individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generallyis usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin accepted that some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world ceases to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of anything meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was expressed well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of an infinite number of turns or of no turns at all.Bakhtin attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for the possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a "nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is an essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such change was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to have developed by continually diverging from his initial intentions. Although it would not necessarily follow that the development of Bakhtin's thought corresponded to his ideas about unity and creativity, we believe that in this case his ideas on nonmonologic unity are useful in understanding his own thoughtas well as that of other thinkers whose careers are comparably varied and productive.

Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics

Morson, Gary Saul

Stanford University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Emerson, Caryl. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Emerson, Caryl

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Emerson, Caryl. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Boris Godunov: Transposition of a Russian Theme (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian & East European Studies (Paperback))

The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin's Original Comedy (Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies)

Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

The Life of Musorgsky (Musical Lives)

The Life of Musorgsky (Musical Lives)

The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin

The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics