Andrew Wachtel

The Russian Pseudo-autobiography and the Creation of Russian Childhood

Dean the Graduate School Andrew Baruch Wachtel

The seven essays in this volume relate to the theme of "intertextuality" in modern Russian drama, including Chekhov's The Seagull, Stravinsky's Petrushka, Mayakovsky's Bedbug, and Blok's The Unknown Woman.

Intertextual Relations in Russian Twentieth-century Drama

Plays of Expectations

Drago Jancar

These newly collected short stories reveal a master at the top of his game. Drago Jancar possesses an acute understanding of the human psyche, enabling his stories to resonate beyond their particular milieu. This collection features seven pieces, drawn from four different collections, that together present the struggle of individuals against powerful forces. The characters try to make sense of a world of shifting borders and changing names that make the idea of a "homeland"—either literal or figurative—a dream rather than a reality.

The Prophecy and Other Stories

This book focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a Yugoslav nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea ultimately failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state. The author argues that the collapse of multinational Yugoslavia and the establishment of separate uninational states did not result from the breakdown of the political or economic fabric of the Yugoslav state; rather, that breakdown itself sprang from the destruction of the concept of a Yugoslav nation. Had such a concept been retained, a collapse of political authority would have been followed by the eventual reconstitution of a Yugoslav state, as happened after World War II, rather than the creation of separate nation-states. Because the author emphasizes nation building rather than state building, the causes and evidence he cites for Yugoslavia’s collapse differ markedly from those that have previously been put forward. He concentrates on culture and cultural politics in the South Slavic lands from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to delineate those ideological mechanisms that helped lay the foundation for the formation of a Yugoslav nation in the first place, sustained the nation during its approximately seventy-year existence, and led to its dissolution. The book describes the evolution of the idea of Yugoslav national unity in four major areas: linguistic policies geared to creating a shared national language, the promulgation of a Yugoslav literary and artistic canon, an educational policy that emphasized the teaching of literature and history in schools, and the production of new literary and artistic works incorporating a Yugoslav view. In the book’s conclusion, the author discusses the relevance of the Yugoslav case for other parts of the world, considering whether the triumph of particularist nationalism is inevitable in multinational states.

Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia

Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation

A special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this volume of essays examines modernity from transnational and transcultural perspectives, holding that within different cultures, there are different starting points of the transition to modernity that lead to differen

Andrew Wachtel

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