Synopses & Reviews
Russia has fascinated outsiders for centuries, and according to Alicia Chudo, it is high time this borscht stopped. In this hilarious send up of Russian literature and history, Chudo takes no prisoners as she examines Russia's great tradition of unreadable geniuses, revolutionaries who can't hit the broad side of a tsar, and Soviets who like their vodka but love their tractors.
Written in the tradition of 1066 and All That, The Pooh Perplex, and The Classics Redefined, And Quiet Flows the Vodka will, with any luck, be the final word on the ghastly first two millennia of Russian literature, history, and culture.
Review
"There is little that needs saying except bravo! . . . [B]y my lights, this is a brilliant satire that clicks from beginning to end. The book is an intriguing mixture of invented nonsense and quite genuine reflections on the sad history of Russia and the qualities--at once morose and wild--of its literature." --Frederick Crews, author of
Postmodern PoohAbout the Author
Alicia Chudo is the author of
Children of Menippus: Despisers of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present and is best known as the founder of the discipline of misanthropology.
Andrew Sobesednikov is an assistant fellow of the Interlocutors Foundation for the Promotion of One-Sided Debate.
Both are pseudonyms of Gary Saul Morson, the author of many books and the founding editor of the Series in Russian Literature and Theory Series, published by Northwestern University Press.
Table of Contents
And Quiet Flows the Vodka, or When Pushkin Comes to ShoveThe Curmudgeon's Guide to Russian Literature and Culture
Editor's Preface
1. Beginnings: The Primary School Chronicle and Prince Vladimir
2. Boris and Gleb and Russian Military Strategy
3. The Hilarious Sermon
4. The Igor Tale
5. The Eighteenth Century
6. Pushkin
7. Gogol, with His Story "Kleptonasia"
8. Herzen and Ogarev
9. Dostoevsky's Unfinished Novel, Torture (from the Notebooks to The Idiot): With Commentary
10. Tolstoy
11. Scene from Chekhov's Play The Dodo
12. The History of Russian Criticism and Thought
13. Notes on the Twentieth Century
Early Twentieth Century: The Age of Pseudonyms
The Nothingist Manifesto (Complete Text)
Formalism and Socialist Realism
Mikhail Bakhtin
Poetry of 1920
Poetry of the 1930s: The Art of Translation
Three New Stories by Daniil Kharms
The Era of Torpor
Postcommunism, Postmodernism
Three Reports from Minsk
Sobesednikov's Dream: Dialogues of the Dead
Appendicitis
Appendix 1: The Awful Russian Language
Appendix 2: Key Dates in Russian History
Appendix 3: Classifieds Reclassified: Advertising Russian History
Appendix 4: Chudo's Familiar Quotations from Russian Culture
Conclusion: Two Dialogues of the Dead on Essential Russianness
An Inivitation to Be Bribed
A Note on the Author and Editor
The Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas
Alphabetical Reflections on the Loathsomeness of Russia, American Academia, and Humanity in General
Editor's Preface
The Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas
A Note on the Author and Editor