All the same the words don't go away
Subtitle: essays on authors, heroes, aesthetics, and stage adaptations from the Russian tradition
By: Caryl Emerson
Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic literatures, cultures and history; Studies in Russian and Slavic literatures, cultures and history
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 422
ISBN-13: 9781934843819
Subjects: History and criticism; Adaptations; Russian literature
Description: All the Same the Words Don't Go Away brings together twenty-five years of essays and reviews, linked loosely by three themes. First is the creative potential inherent in transposing classic literary texts into other genres or media (operatic, dramatic) and the responsibilities, if any, that govern the transposer, audience, and critic. The practice of transposition, however, gives rise to a creative conflict: is there a limit to the amount of ornamentation, pressure, or dilution to which the "mediated" word can be subject? Finally, the more polemical of the essays included here are structured on the Bakhtinian notion of coexisting "plausibilities" and points of view. What a carnival approach can uncover in Pushkin that might have surprised and even pleased the poet, what a libretto or play script brings out that the "true original" hides: here the work of the creator and the critic co-exist in exhilarating ways that respect the competencies of each. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Polyphony, dialogism, Dostoevsky (1997); title: Carnival: open-ended bodies and anachronistic histories (1997); title: Bakhtin at 100: looking back at the very early years (1995); title: Coming to terms with carnival: ancient, modern, sub specie aeternitatis (2002); title: Twenty-five years later: Gasparov on Bakhtin (2006); title: Our everything (2004); title: Tatiana (1995); title: Postscript to "Tatiana": the reaction from Tambovsk, Pskov, Novosibirsk (1997); title: 'Boris Godunov': tragedy, comedy, carnival, and history on stage (2006); title: Postscript on Pushkin's 'Boris Godunov' (2010); title: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: seductions of the old criticism (1994); title: Dostoevsky versus Tolstoy on evil-doers and the art of the novel (2001); title: Postscript to "Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on evil-doing" (2010); title: Milan Kundera on not liking Dostoevsky (2002); title: Review of Jay Parini's 'The last station: a novel of Tolstoy's last year' (1990); title: Postscript to Parini and Hoffman, 2010: some thoughts on Tolstoy in the performance mode, with a digression on Tolstoy and Shakespeare (2010); title: Chekhov and the Annas (1997); title: Excerpts from the Foreword to Richard Taruskin, 'Musorgsky: eight essays and an epilogue' (1993); title: Musorgsky's libretti on historical themes: from the two Borises to 'Khovanshchina' (1988); title: Review of Alexander Tumanov's 'The life and artistry of Maria Olenina-d'Alheim (2002); title: Tchaikovsky's Tatiana (1997); title: Tchaikovsky's 'Eugene Onegin': the women and their worlds (2001); title: Little tragedies, little operas (2003); title: The endurance of war, the deceptions of peace: Prokofiev's operatic masterpiece (2002); title: "Shostakovich and the Russian literary tradition" (2004); title: Editor's introduction: Princeton's 'Boris Godunov,' 1936/2007 (2007); title: Editor's postscript to actors' testimonials (2007); title: Afterword: the fate of the jubilee Pushkin on the Stalinist musical-dramatic stage (2007); title: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) bio-bibliographical sketch (2010); title: The Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofiev collaboration on 'Eugene Onegin,' 1936 (a lesser-known casualty of the Pushkin death jubilee) (2008).