Russian Myths - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Russian Myths write by Elizabeth Warner. This book was released on 2002-07-01. Russian Myths available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The coming of Christianity to the state of Kievan Rus' at the end of the tenth century had an enormous impact on the development of Russian civilization. Despite the abandonment of the pagan gods, both Christian and pagan practices and beliefs continued to coexist for centuries, producing a system known as "dual faith." Russian Myths deals with mythic beliefs, notions, and customs—concerning the veneration of earth, water, fire, and air, demons and spirit-beings in the world of nature, the cult of the dead, and witchcraft—many of which have their roots in the pre-Christian past but still survive to the present day. To illuminate the evolution of major themes and motifs and set Russian myths in the context of mythology the world over, Elizabeth Warner draws upon a rich variety of sources, including anecdotal narrative forms and religious legends, epic songs, funeral laments and folk religion, and, of course, the folktales where the sacred gives way to pure imagination in the depiction of mythic themes and characters.
The Russian Folktale by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp
The Russian Folktale by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Russian Folktale by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp write by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp. This book was released on 2012-09-12. The Russian Folktale by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Vladimir Propp is the Russian folklore specialist most widely known outside Russia thanks to the impact of his 1928 book Morphology of the Folktale-but Morphology is only the first of Propp's contributions to scholarship. This volume translates into English for the first time his book The Russian Folktale, which was based on a seminar on Russian folktales that Propp taught at Leningrad State University late in his life. Edited and translated by Sibelan Forrester, this English edition contains Propp's own text and is supplemented by notes from his students. The Russian Folktale begins with Propp's description of the folktale's aesthetic qualities and the history of the term; the history of folklore studies, first in Western Europe and then in Russia and the USSR; and the place of the folktale in the matrix of folk culture and folk oral creativity. The book presents Propp's key insight into the formulaic structure of Russian wonder tales (and less schematically than in Morphology, though in abbreviated form), and it devotes one chapter to each of the main types of Russian folktales: the wonder tale, the "novellistic" or everyday tale, the animal tale, and the cumulative tale. Even Propp's bibliography, included here, gives useful insight into the sources accessible to and used by Soviet scholars in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Propp's scholarly authority and his human warmth both emerge from this well-balanced and carefully structured series of lectures. An accessible introduction to the Russian folktale, it will serve readers interested in folklore and fairy-tale studies in addition to Russian history and cultural studies.
Encyclopedia of Russian and Slavic Myth and Legend
Encyclopedia of Russian and Slavic Myth and Legend - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Encyclopedia of Russian and Slavic Myth and Legend write by Mike Dixon-Kennedy. This book was released on 1998-01-01. Encyclopedia of Russian and Slavic Myth and Legend available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Covers the myths and legends of the Russian Empire at its greatest extent as well as other Slavic people and countries. Includes historical, geographical, and biographical background information.
Terror and Greatness
Terror and Greatness - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Terror and Greatness write by Kevin M. F. Platt. This book was released on 2011-05-15. Terror and Greatness available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed. Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation’s collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power—past, present, future—in Russia.
Mother Russia
Mother Russia - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Mother Russia write by Joanna Hubbs. This book was released on 1993-09-22. Mother Russia available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "Joanna Hubbs has found the trace of Baba Yaga and the rusalki and Moist Mother Earth and other fascinating feminine myths in Russian culture, and has added richly to the growing interest in popular culture." -- New York Times Book Review "... brave... fascinating... immensely enjoyable... " -- Times Higher Education Supplement "... a stimulating and original study... vivid and readable." -- Russian Review "An immensely stimulating, beautifully written work of scholarship." -- Francine du Plessix Gray "Joanna Hubbs has provided scholars... with a wealth of significant interpretive material to inform if not reform views of both Russian and women's cultures." -- Journal of American Folklore A ground-breaking interpretation of Russian culture from prehistory to the present, dealing with the feminine myth as a central cultural force.
