Search results

Text: Bunin: Loss and Remembrance George Pahomov* The significance of memory and nostalgia in shaping Bunin's art has been acknowledged by critics through time and across ideological gulfs. Soviet critics tended to see emigration as the prime cause of Bunin's nostalgia and the wellspring of his art. Thus, typically for his school, Afanas'ev asserts that Bunin's "lyrical prose" which is the direct expression of the author's feelings is determined by «тоска писателя...

Text: Chekhov: Beyond Determinism George Pahomov* Though Chekhov's middle and later works seem to take an increasingly somber and pessimistic view of life, most critics agree that his early writings are the vibrant, even frolicsome, product of a happy sensibility.1 The years 1888-1889 have been widely accepted as a period of spiritual crisis for Chekhov and pointed to as a watershed, the downward slope of which, though marked by occasional rises, ineluctably banks into a darkening valley.3 Yet th

Text: CHEKHOV: CATEGORIES OF TIME AND ENTROPY GEORGE PAHOMOV Bryn Mawr College In the nineteenth century, as perhaps in no other era, science provided models to be borrowed for the understanding and assessment of individual human beings and of human society. Darwin's theorizing on evolution was readily applied by social critics and theoreticians to their realms. The physical sciences were similarly reverenced. Entropy, a concept engendered in the study of the dissipation of heat in steam engines

Text: George (Юрий Григорьевич) Krugovoy 1924-2012 George Krugovoy died in Springfield, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, on December 22, 2012. He was born in 1924 in Kharkov, then in the Soviet Union, and grew up in a time of famine and political terror to which his father fell victim. Toward the end of World War II he made his way westward, part of an enormous stream of displaced persons. He found refuge in Austria where he lived for some twelve years, working and studying at the University of

Text: Nature and the Use of Paradox in Hirgenev George Pahomov* Hirgenev has been traditionally cited for his placid and languid, if not torpid, style. Nowhere has this been more true than in his set-piece descriptions of nature. It is here that the absence of dynamic elements which energize the prose of other writers is most keenly felt. Time, plot, character development, action and counter-action, climax and resolution are suspended as the dynamic is eschewed in favor of the static. Yet the need to

Text: Perceptions of the Trinity: Bakhtin and Co-being in Russian Literary Culture George Pahomov* It may be asserted that an implicit task of Orthodoxy is to keep human beings from becoming isolated. Isolation, to the Orthodox mind, is the road that leads to self-absorption and solipsism, to self-idolatry, the creation of an absolutely sovereign self, and has a pernicious effect on human behavior. In his writings Dostoevsky was keenly aware of this tendency. His demonic characters do not have the wil

Text: Religious Motifs in Chekhov's "Muzhiki" George Pahomov* The acceptance or denial of the concept, suggested by some anthropologists and psychologists, that art is rooted in mankind's attempt to commune with the sacred becomes of no consequence if the work of art at hand contains explicit religious themes. Thus; in Chekhov's "Muzhiki," without any a priori commitment to its meaning or evaluation, one notes, as pure recurring phenomena, the rich resonance of Easte

Text: Valentine Tfcchebotarioff-Bill. Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom. New York: Philosophical Library, 1987. 277 pp. The book is presented in the essayistic tradition of Isaiah Berlin and George Steiner, and its contemplative approach is meant to engage the educated reader as well as the specialist. It succeeds rather well in the task it sets for itself. The author recapitulates the moral/didactic tradition of Russian literature exemplified by Dostoevslcy and Tblstoy, by die various ideological

Text: ZHUKOVSKY AND PUSHKIN: TRUE BELIEVER AND SKEPTIC by George Pahomov * The present paper will mark some of the similarities and differences in the treatment of love by Zhukovsky and Pushkin as found in their lyrics. On the basis of the theme of love it will attempt to evaluate the nature of Pushkin's contribution to Russian literature on this 175th anniversary of his birth. The two poets' conception of love cannot be understood without understanding something of the nature of romanticism

Libraries