Andrew Wachtel
Biographic Data
| ID | 98575 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Wachtel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Wachtel |
| SIGNATURE | WACHTEL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | American University of Central Asia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 39 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Manas and Homer
The world’s great epics, including Gilgamesh , the Iliad , the Odyssey , and Beowolf , certainly existed as oral literature before they were committed to writing. There is controversy, however, regarding just how closely the written texts we have correspond to what ancient audiences heard in performance. An analysis of the known pre-Soviet and Soviet performance practice of the Kyrgyz epic Manas , however, allows us to guess that the written vers…
Post-Yugoslav constellations
"Post-Yugoslav constellations: archive, memory, and trauma in contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian literature and culture." Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 17(3), pp. 507–508
A Tale of Two Heroes
National identity can be based on a wide variety of shared markers that encourage members of a given community to identify with their putative conationals. National heroes comprise one such potential shared marker. This paper focuses on national hero creation in Kyrgyzstan, a small Central Asian country currently in the active phase of nation creation. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Kyrgyz nation creators are deploying the figures of…
Branko Banović. The Montenegrin Warrior Tradition
This dense but extremely rewarding book covers much more than its title promises, and it does so in fewer than 160 pages. Essentially, it is a study of how national identity is created, contested a
The Cult of the Author
From the Museum of Unconditional Surrender to the Museum of Innocence
Andrew B. Wachtel, FROM THE MUSEUM OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER TO THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE: MUSEUM NOVELS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION AND VIRTUALIZATION, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 60, No. 3 (FALL 2016), pp. 539-552
Kyrgyzstan between democratization and ethnic intolerance
The international community has expressed great concern about the treatment of the Uzbek minority in the south of Kyrgyzstan and has called on the majority community to make major efforts to improve the situation. The article compares the treatment of minorities in Kyrgyzstan with analogous situations in the Balkans and contends that, given the European-style ethnonational state model and democratic political system that have been adopted by inde…
One Day-Fifty Years Later
November 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) in the Moscow journal Novyi mir. In this article, Andrew Wachtel considers Solzhenitsyn's pathbreaking work in its original publication context. It examines the editorial preface and the two orthodox contemporary works of Soviet socialist realism the editor chose as bookends …
Severed Heads and Living Corpses
The central image of Leo Tolstoy’s late novella Hadji Murat is that of the eponymous dead hero’s severed head. Although severed heads have been objects of fascination in many cultures, in the modern West they have usually been linked to ideas of “oriental” brutality. Tolstoy, by contrast, opposes the curiously alive severed head of the non-European Hadji Murat, with its “childish, good-natured expression,” to the dead head of the living Tsar Nich…
Veiled from Solitude by the Atlantic
Anzhelina Polonskaya was born in Malakhovka, a small town near Moscow. Since 1998 she has been a member of the Moscow Union of Writers, and in 2003 Polonskaya became a member of the Russian PEN Center. In 2004 her book A Voice appeared in the acclaimed Writings from an Unbound Europe series at Northwestern University Press. The book was shortlisted for the 2005 Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation and for the American Asso…
The Balkans in World History
In the historical and literary imagination, the Balkans loom large as a somewhat frightening but ill-defined space. Most attempts at definition focus on geography (the actual mountain range that gives the area its name and the lands surrounding it) or, more recently, on the set of prejudices attached to the term by local and outside observers. There has been far less concern with attempting to define this space in positive terms, taking as a star…
History in a Glass
Research Article| May 01 2008 History in a Glass Andrew Wachtel Andrew Wachtel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2008) 20 (2): 193–198. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-023 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Wachtel; History in a Glass. Public Culture 1 May 2008; 20 (2): 193–198. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-023 Downlo…
How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself
Plays of Expectations
The Legacy of Danilo Kiš in Post-Yugoslav Literature
A Voice
Writers and Society in Eastern Europe, 1989-2000
Although an enormous amount has been written about the political, social, and economic effects of post-communist transition, little concern has been paid to its equally traumatic effects on culture—particularly literary culture which was traditionally highly valued in Eastern Europe. Based on field research conducted in 10 countries, this article documents the changes in the environment for literary publishing and the extent to which writers in p…
Shakespeare and Eastern Europe
Book Review| April 01 2003 Shakespeare and Eastern Europe Zdenek Stribrny, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 192 pp. Andrew Wachtel Andrew Wachtel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2003) 9 (2): 351. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9-2-351-a Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Wachtel; Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Common Knowledge 1 April 2003; 9 (2):…
Dostoevsky's The Idiot
In the third chapter of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, as the novel's protagonist Prince Myshkin prepares to fulfil a calligraphy assignment provided by General Ivan Federovich Epanchin, he overhears the following conversation between the General and his employee, Gavril Ivanovich (Ganya) Ivolgin.1 ‘“What's this?” the General asked Ganya, who in the meantime had taken a large photograph from his briefcase and handed it to him. “Hah! It's Nastasia Filipp…
Revisiting Ruritania and Vulgaria
Hieroglyphs of Another World
Intersections and Transpositions
This collection serves as an introduction to the great variety of approaches being used by Slavicists and historians to situate music and literature in the Russian cultural imagination. The first part focuses on music in art; part two centres on music in life
Petrushka
The contributors - two Slavicists, a musicologist and an art historian - offer a detailed exploration of the ballet, Petrushka, which premiered in Russia in 1911 and became one of the most important and influential theatrical works of the modernist period
Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia
Other| January 01 1999 Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia Andrew Wachtel Andrew Wachtel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1999) 11 (1): 49–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-1-49 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Wachtel; Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia. Public Culture 1…
The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel
Many Russian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made a huge impact, not only inside the boundaries of their own country but across the western world. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of these novels, in fourteen newly-commissioned essays by prominent European and North American scholars. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philoso…
Issues in the Ethics of Research Method
There is a pattern of elements within the Anglo-American structure of thinking and reasoning which affects methods of data collection, data analysis, and systems of information dispersion with respect to studies of non-Western cultures. An argument is built in this paper which maintains that: (1) These same elements hinder some Anglo-American anthropologists from studying their own cultures. They form a pattern which begins with the selection of …
Kyrgyzstan between democratization and ethnic intolerance
The international community has expressed great concern about the treatment of the Uzbek minority in the south of Kyrgyzstan and has called on the majority community to make major efforts to improve the situation. The article compares the treatment of minorities in Kyrgyzstan with analogous situations in the Balkans and contends that, given the European-style ethnonational state model and democratic political system that have been adopted by inde…
A Tale of Two Heroes
National identity can be based on a wide variety of shared markers that encourage members of a given community to identify with their putative conationals. National heroes comprise one such potential shared marker. This paper focuses on national hero creation in Kyrgyzstan, a small Central Asian country currently in the active phase of nation creation. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Kyrgyz nation creators are deploying the figures of…
An Obsession with History
The author traces the role of Russian literature over two hundred years in creating and sustaining the notion of the singularity of their own history and of its relationship to the history of the outside world.The author describes the development of this tradition through an analysis of major works including Karamzin's History of the Russian State, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. His analysis of this tradition ha…
The Battle for Childhood
Introduction 1. L. N. Tolstoy and his Childhood 2. S. T. Aksakov: a broader vision 3. Canonizing the myths of Russian gentry childhood 4. M. Gorky: Anti-Childhood 5. The modernist childhood of A. Belyi 6. I. A. Bunin: preserving the tradition in exile Conclusion Notes Bibliography
Writers and Society in Eastern Europe, 1989-2000
Although an enormous amount has been written about the political, social, and economic effects of post-communist transition, little concern has been paid to its equally traumatic effects on culture—particularly literary culture which was traditionally highly valued in Eastern Europe. Based on field research conducted in 10 countries, this article documents the changes in the environment for literary publishing and the extent to which writers in p…
Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia
Other| January 01 1999 Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia Andrew Wachtel Andrew Wachtel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1999) 11 (1): 49–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-1-49 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Wachtel; Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia. Public Culture 1…
Third Wave
Issues in the Ethics of Research Method
There is a pattern of elements within the Anglo-American structure of thinking and reasoning which affects methods of data collection, data analysis, and systems of information dispersion with respect to studies of non-Western cultures. An argument is built in this paper which maintains that: (1) These same elements hinder some Anglo-American anthropologists from studying their own cultures. They form a pattern which begins with the selection of …
Esthetics as Nightmare
As an epoch of censorship terror drew to a close with the death of Nicholas I and the end of the Crimean War, Russian intellectuals had begun expressing their desires for political, philosophical, and religious reform through passionate debates over literature and esthetics. Charles Moser re-creates the leading controversies over literature and art during a crucial period that saw the work of such authors as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Emp…
Narrative and Anti-Narrative Structures in Lev Tolstoj's Early Works
The Battle for Childhood. Creation of a Russian Myth
The Battle for Childhood
Introduction 1. L. N. Tolstoy and his Childhood 2. S. T. Aksakov: a broader vision 3. Canonizing the myths of Russian gentry childhood 4. M. Gorky: Anti-Childhood 5. The modernist childhood of A. Belyi 6. I. A. Bunin: preserving the tradition in exile Conclusion Notes Bibliography
The White Monk
The Bell of Freedom
Borderline Culture
Beyond Metafiction
Metafiction and Soviet literature reflecting on fiction - Leonid Leonov facts versus figures - Marietta Shaginyan discrowning the writer - Konstantin Vaginov knowing the artist - Veniamin Kaverin re-reading, rewriting rewriting literary history
An Obsession with History
The author traces the role of Russian literature over two hundred years in creating and sustaining the notion of the singularity of their own history and of its relationship to the history of the outside world.The author describes the development of this tradition through an analysis of major works including Karamzin's History of the Russian State, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. His analysis of this tradition ha…
Third Wave
Tolstoy's Childhood
The Life of Arseniev
Postmodernism as Nightmare
The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel
Many Russian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made a huge impact, not only inside the boundaries of their own country but across the western world. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of these novels, in fourteen newly-commissioned essays by prominent European and North American scholars. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philoso…
Petrushka
The contributors - two Slavicists, a musicologist and an art historian - offer a detailed exploration of the ballet, Petrushka, which premiered in Russia in 1911 and became one of the most important and influential theatrical works of the modernist period
Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia
Other| January 01 1999 Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia Andrew Wachtel Andrew Wachtel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1999) 11 (1): 49–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-1-49 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Wachtel; Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia. Public Culture 1…
Intersections and Transpositions
This collection serves as an introduction to the great variety of approaches being used by Slavicists and historians to situate music and literature in the Russian cultural imagination. The first part focuses on music in art; part two centres on music in life
Dostoevsky's The Idiot
In the third chapter of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, as the novel's protagonist Prince Myshkin prepares to fulfil a calligraphy assignment provided by General Ivan Federovich Epanchin, he overhears the following conversation between the General and his employee, Gavril Ivanovich (Ganya) Ivolgin.1 ‘“What's this?” the General asked Ganya, who in the meantime had taken a large photograph from his briefcase and handed it to him. “Hah! It's Nastasia Filipp…
Revisiting Ruritania and Vulgaria
Hieroglyphs of Another World
Writers and Society in Eastern Europe, 1989-2000
Although an enormous amount has been written about the political, social, and economic effects of post-communist transition, little concern has been paid to its equally traumatic effects on culture—particularly literary culture which was traditionally highly valued in Eastern Europe. Based on field research conducted in 10 countries, this article documents the changes in the environment for literary publishing and the extent to which writers in p…
Shakespeare and Eastern Europe
Book Review| April 01 2003 Shakespeare and Eastern Europe Zdenek Stribrny, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 192 pp. Andrew Wachtel Andrew Wachtel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2003) 9 (2): 351. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9-2-351-a Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Wachtel; Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Common Knowledge 1 April 2003; 9 (2):…
The Legacy of Danilo Kiš in Post-Yugoslav Literature
A Voice
History (28 works) · Art (22 works) · Literature (19 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Ancient history (7 works)