Böcker av Caryl Emerson

The volume contains essays and reviews written over thirty years, linked loosely by three themes. First is the global resonance of Mikhail Bakhtin as moral philosopher, theorist of dialogue, and cultural totem. How does his worldview complement that of his friendly rivals the formalists (and later semioticians), and which aspects of his value-system have been most cogently criticized? Second is an application of Bakhtinian principles of transposition to successive musicalized Russian classics (among them Pushkin's and Meyerhold's Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky's and Prokofiev's Eugene Onegin, Prokofiev's War and Peace, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Pushkin's and Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka). A final theme is the creative--or capricious--reading of one literary master by another master, much later in time: Tolstoy's reading of Shakespeare, Nabokov's reading of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Krzhizhanovsky's reading of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw. Great writers, like great composers, absorb and transform earlier greatness into a new synthesis, and it is this activity that is commemorated in this volume.

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. This title examines the role of his ideas in the post-Stalinist revival of the Russian literary profession.

All the Same the Words Don't Go Away brings together twenty-five years of essays and reviews, linked loosely by three themes. The first explores the legacy of Mikhail Bakhtin: his ideas of dialogue and carnival, and the debates ignited by each. The second delves into three "e;master workers"e; of the Russian tradition: Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. In this section, emphasis is comparative: the riddle of Pushkin's life, why "e;Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky,"e; how Chekhov reads Tolstoy, why Kundera dislikes Doestoevsky and Tolstoy dislikes Shakespeare. The final section addresses the transposition of classic literary texts into other media through musical works by Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. Throughout, the fundamental heroes are Pushkin's Tatiana Larina and Boris Godunov. This volume will be of interest to comparativists and students in interdisciplinary humanities.