Abstract The Russia in which Isaak Babel (1894-1940) wrote was one of deep seated anti-Semitic philosophies and prejudices, a place of pogroms and segregation. Literature of this era painted the Jew as a villainous, dishonest, and feeble minded foreign being within society. Traditionally, Russian literature used the Jew as a national scapegoat or a comical stock character ripe for ridicule. Babel’s contemporaries considered him to be a born writer with a gift for minimalism without the sacrifice of vivid description. His was an evocative style of brutal humanism, showing both character flaws and character virtues. The Odesskie rasskazy (Odessa Tales) epitomized this honest approach to human portrayal. The Jewish community of the Odesskie rasskazy boasted a variety of characters from all walks of life, rejecting the previously perpetuated stereotype. The Jew, as shown by Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov, was simply a caricature. Such characters were restricted to the role of the fool, the thief, and the opportunist. When Babel first described the community, people, and culture of his native shtetl, the previous stereotype of the Russian Jew became an antiquated relic of the past. This thesis will explore some examples of earlier depiction of Jews in literature and the humanized image of Russian Jewry that Babel created in his Odesskie rasskazy. The analysis will discuss how these depictions created a new, three dimensional characterization of the Jew.

Abstract The Russia in which Isaak Babel (1894-1940) wrote was one of deep seated anti-Semitic philosophies and prejudices, a place of pogroms and segregation. Literature of this era painted the Jew as a villainous, dishonest, and feeble minded foreign being within society. Traditionally, Russian literature used the Jew as a national scapegoat or a comical stock character ripe for ridicule. Babel’s contemporaries considered him to be a born writer with a gift for minimalism without the sacrifice of vivid description. His was an evocative style of brutal humanism, showing both character flaws and character virtues. The Odesskie rasskazy (Odessa Tales) epitomized this honest approach to human portrayal. The Jewish community of the Odesskie rasskazy boasted a variety of characters from all walks of life, rejecting the previously perpetuated stereotype. The Jew, as shown by Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov, was simply a caricature. Such characters were restricted to the role of the fool, the thief, and the opportunist. When Babel first described the community, people, and culture of his native shtetl, the previous stereotype of the Russian Jew became an antiquated relic of the past. This thesis will explore some examples of earlier depiction of Jews in literature and the humanized image of Russian Jewry that Babel created in his Odesskie rasskazy. The analysis will discuss how these depictions created a new, three dimensional characterization of the Jew.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Text in English, with some Russian, French and Spanish. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-240). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio State University, 2002. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 205 p. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Angela K. Brintlinger, Dept.of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Literatures. Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-205).

Staliniana is an eclectic genre of Russian literature of the Soviet period. It deals with the fictional image of I. V. Stalin and the impact of his life and politics on history. For several decades it was the core of socialist realist literature and Stalin's personality cult. / The first chapter discusses the phenomena of Stalin's personality cult in the context of the intellectual history of the post-revolutionary Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter two offers different classifications of a vast amount of fiction written on Stalin. The genesis and documented development of staliniana is discussed in the third chapter. Special attention is paid to the manipulations in the genre exercised by ideological and cultural authorities in the USSR from the 1920s to the 1970s. The fourth chapter discusses some aspects of staliniana in Western Europe as contrasted to Soviet literature. In the fifth chapter a detailed analysis of key elements of the codified literary image of Stalin is undertaken. Chapter six explores the folklore background of Stalin's cult and its interaction with the cult of V. I. Lenin. The final chapter offers an analysis of the development of the language used by Stalin as a fictional character in works of literature. This study uses the recently declassified materials from Soviet archives in order to demonstrate that staliniana was not only a key element of the Stalin cult but also a cornerstone of Soviet literature.

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This thesis examines the role nineteenth-century women's literary journals, specifically Ladies' Journal (1823--1833), played in the development of Russian literature. The longest-lived and most-circulated of the pre-Soviet women's literary journals, Ladies' Journal was well-positioned to have contributed to the on-going formation of a national literature through its influence on the Russian woman writer and reader. Ladies' Journal served as a forum for new Russian women writers and translators. It also promoted the discussion of women's issues. However, Ladies' Journal had a contradictory editorial policy concerning women and literature. While advocating women stake their own ground as writers, Ladies' Journal modeled the type of writer it wanted. The ideal writer was the inspiration of male poets and did not differ from the Romantic heroine or the ideal Romantic woman. This was a gesture in the spirit of the time, but it had consequences for Russian literature and for the poetics and politics of Russian women's journals to come.

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The present thesis analyzes the cultural image of the Russian neo-Romantic writer Alexander Grin (1880-1932) as it has been constructed by Soviet ideology and received in Soviet popular culture since the late 1950s. The topic of the thesis is unique, and it has not yet been investigated before. The thesis explores three major aspects of Grin's representation in Soviet culture: critical, fictional and cinematic. The first part "Critical representation of Grin's works in the USSR" focuses upon the process of construction and development of ideological "myths about Grin" in the system of Soviet culture. It demonstrates and analyzes the transformation of the official and public attitude to Grin's works from the 1920s to the 1980s. The second part is entitled "Representation of Grin's image in Soviet fiction: Grin as a fictional character". Through the coherent analysis of three Soviet novels (introducing Alexander Grin as a protagonist), it explores the phenomenon of the transformation of both the personal and socio-cultural attitudes to Grin. The fictional works are viewed in chronological order: The Black Sea by Konstantin Paustovsky (Chernoe more, 1935), The Wizard from Gel'-Giu by Leonid Borisov (Volshebnik iz Gel'-Giu, 1944) and The Lord of Chances by Valentin Zorin (Povelitel' sluchaynostey, 1977-79). The third part concentrates entirely on the Cinematic representation of Grin's works on the Soviet screen, analyzing five major film-versions of Grin's works: Scarlet Sails (Alye parusa, dir. Ptushko, 1961), She Who Runs the Waves (Begushchaya po volnam, dir. Lubimov, 1967), Shining World (Blistayushchiy mir, dir. Mansurov, 1984), The Golden Chain (Zolotaya Tsep , dir. Muratov, 1986), Mister Designer (Gospodin oformitel', dir. Teptsov, 1986). The study of Grin's case offers a unique opportunity to investigate how the old ideological myths are occupying the minds of younger generations nowadays. Grin is still a "cult figure" for Russian society, but it remains to be investigated to what extent his contemporary image (and the image of his fiction) is influenced by the old models of the Soviet era.