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This book is an examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol′ga Berggol′ts (1910–1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This book addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity. Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as ‘official’ figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol′ts's work shows that the borders between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. The text discusses how Berggol′ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol′ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion that connects texts of different genres, ‘official’ as well as ‘unofficial’ writing.

The Iliad is a poem whose events revolve around the “anger” of Achilles, and his personal fierceness and pursuit of glory remain, despite different and more complex nuances, the prevailing features of his characterization. This book proposes to investigate how different literary authors and visual artists at different periods responded to Achilles' “erotic life”, an aspect about which the Iliadwas almost completely silent. Achilles' loves expose a crack in the usually self-assured attitude of the hero, demonstrating the limits of epic heroism and the epic vision of the world. As such, these moments of erotic “weakness” became perfect manifestos for reuse in other genres, such as tragedy and the various forms of love poetry, in which themes of love and passion were more customary than in heroic epic.

This book tells the story of Durgā, the buffalo-demon-slaying deity dear to Indic rulers, between the 3rd and the 12th centuries CE, as she transformed from a Vaiṣṇava, to a Śaiva and finally to a supreme deity, a concentrated power-source Śakti, in whom all divinities and dualities were thought to inhere and also to transcend. Reconstructed through mythology, liturgy, the belles lettres, ritual instructions, epigraphy, local legends of kingship, sculptural evidence and anthropological studies, the stages of this story illuminate an entire belief system concerning political power: warrior-centric goddess worship called heroic Śāktism in the book. The belief that a good king and a true warrior must worship the goddess Durgā, the form and substance of kingship, heroic Śāktism formed the bedrock of ancient Indian practices of cultivating political power. Wildly dangerous and serenely benevolent at one and the same time, the goddess's charismatic split nature promised rewards for a hero and king and success in risky ventures. Fundamentally, the slow development of this deity cannot be disentangled from the narrative of the state in pre-modern India. Heroic Śāktism unfolded within a social landscape of conquest and competition, dependent on a monsoon economy in which harvests were unreliable and the appeasement of gods in control of environmental crises, foremost among whom was the goddess, was paramount. Its emergence is imbricated with the imperatives of state: military expansion, especially after the demise of the Gupta empire, the rise of local lineages, the assertion of regional cultic identities, the authorization of territorial ownership and the development of the regular ritual life of kingdoms. All these political processes involved Durgā at their very core. She was the prime symbol that communities used to articulate the shifts they underwent during the fluctuations of expansion and consolidation. This story of the Goddess and political power is shown in three discrete but related parts. The first ‘Beginnings’ tracks a historical process by plotting the development of her cult from its early form in the Gupta period to its mature phase in the 11th century CE, when it had secured more robust patronage, and by showing the sectarian appropriations and consequent conceptual and ritualistic amplifications in the understanding of the deity along the way. In the second part, ‘Synthesis’, focused on the 12th century CE, Heroic Śāktism is seen as a social phenomenon representing diversified state-power, arising when the single monolithic Durgā transformed into a deity incorporating regional authorities that partook of her larger identity in order to consolidate and integrate themselves into a pan-Indic network. In the third part, ‘Belief Systems and rituals’, Heroic Śāktism is explored through its matrix of ideas, beliefs and stories, and the ritual enactments, coalescing during the Navarātra, during which this idea-matrix was enlivened through hymn, offering and prayer, whereby the cult acquired meaning and purpose in society and culture. For without ritual, without the enmeshing of goddess into relationships with people, the cult and its notion of power were incomplete and without effective connection to the world.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is Russia's greatest poet, a ‘ founding father’ of modern Russian literature, and a major figure in world literature. His poetry and prose changed the course of Russian culture, and his works inspired operas by Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky (as well as Peter Shaffer's Amadeus). This book's title refers to Pushkin's capacity to transform philosophical and aesthetic ideas into poetry. Arguing that Pushkin's poetry has often been misunderstood as transparently simple, this book traces the interrelation between his writing and the influences of English and European literature and cultural movements on his understanding of the creative process and the aims of art. The book approaches Pushkin's poetic texts through the history of ideas, and argues that in his poetry the clashes that matter are not about stylistic innovation and genre, as has often been suggested. Instead, the poems are shown to articulate a range of positions on key topics of the period, including the meaning of originality, the imagination, the status of the poet, the role of commercial success, the definition of genius, representation of nature, the definition of the hero, and the immortality of the soul. The book addresses how theories of inspiration informed Pushkin's thinking about classicism and Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s. It looks at the intersection of Pushkin's knowledge of important ideas and artistic trends with poems about the creative imagination, psychology, sex and the body, heroism and the ethical life, and death.

This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, the book examines the foundational relation between war and the political. Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt's and Weil's voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, the book traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of the notion and practice of “the impolitical.” Within the book, Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, the book unravels the West's illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.

This book is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. It tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, the book captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. It lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war. Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The book tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. This is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the doctors and surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.