Now Available: "I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left": The Poetics of Boris Slutsky

[Academic Studies Press]

***My apologies for cross postings!***

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Academic Studies Press is pleased to announce that "I am to be read not from
left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left": The Poetics of Boris
Slutsky by Marat Grinberg is now available. Please visit our website at
<http://www.academicstudiespress.com/> www.academicstudiespress.com for more
information about this book and the other titles we publish.  We work with
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“I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left”:
The Poetics of Boris Slutsky

By Marat Grinberg

 

ISBN 978-1-934843-73-4 (cloth) $65.00 / £54.50

482pp., January 2011

 

 

Series: Borderlines: Russian and East European-Jewish Studies

 

Topic Areas: Modernism, Literary Criticism; Russian and Former Soviet Union
and Poetry

 

Level: Academic; upper undergraduate and graduate level, General Reader

 

Summary: Boris Slutsky (1919-1986) is a major original figure of Russian
poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, whose oeuvre has
remained unexplored and unstudied.  The first scholarly study of the poet,
Marat Grinberg’s book substantially fills this critical lacuna in the
current comprehension of Russian and Soviet literatures.  Grinberg argues
that Slutsky’s body of work amounts to a Holy Writ of his times, which
daringly fuses biblical prooftexts and stylistics with the language of late
Russian Modernism and Soviet newspeak. The book is directed toward readers
of Russian poetry and pan-Jewish poetic traditions, scholars of Soviet
culture and history and the burgeoning field of Russian Jewish studies.
Finally, it contributes to the general field of poetics and Modernism.

 

Author: Marat Grinberg (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2006) is Assistant
Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His
recent essays include “’The Problem of Evil’:  an Exchange with Tony Judt”
(The New York Review of Books, 2008); “’All the Young Poets have Become Old
Jews’:  Boris Slutsky’s Russian Jewish Canon” (East European Jewish Affairs,
2007) and “The Midrash from Joseph: ‘Isaac and Abraham’ as Brodsky’s
Ur-Text” Poetics. Self. Place:  Essays in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone
(Bloomington, Slavica, 2007).

  

Reviews:

 

“Boris Slutsky, according to this brilliant book, accomplished the seemingly
impossible: a poet of Soviet times, he reforged the totality of Russian
literary culture, from Church Slavonic to Pushkin to Khlebnikov and beyond,
within the crucible of Jewish self-understanding.

 

 Marat Grinberg, author of this impressive study, has also accomplished the
seemingly impossible. He demonstrates how this supremely Russian poet can
and must be read in his totality: “from right to left,” from beginning to
end, and from his desk drawer to Red Square.”

—David G. Roskies, Sol and Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature,
Jewish Theological Seminary. Director, Center for Yiddish Studies, Ben
Gurion University of the Negev

 

“In this erudite and insightful book, Marat Grinberg rescues a great poet
from a numbing set of mid-century clichés. No longer a “war poet,” or
“Soviet diarist,” or sometime Jew, Boris Slutsky emerges as he was in fact—a
sometimes playful, sometimes anguished heir to Russian modernism, who read
Jewish catastrophe through Jewish texts.”

—Alice Nakhimovsky, Professor of Russian and Jewish Studies, Colgate
University

Best Wishes!

Stephanie Monasky

Sales and Marketing

Academic Studies Press


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