And Quiet Flows the Vodka: or When Pushkin Comes to Shove: The Curmudgeon's Guide to Russian Literature with the Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas - Softcover

Chudo, Alicia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810117886 ISBN 13: 9780810117884

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About 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.

From Kirkus Reviews

Russian history and literature get a good thrashing from truly grouchy Professor Chudo, assisted by editor Sobesednikov--both of whom are official pseudonyms of Russian Lit maven Gary S. Morson.Steppe by steppe, we learn from this elaborate put-on--and put-down--about the Russian national drink (vodka), national philosophy (vodka), national song (Vodka!), and most recent Five-Year Plan (anti-Semitism). Obscurity becomes lucid and vice versa. Obviously Chudo knows a lot of arcane stuff about the Slavic intelligentsia and does her utmost to protect us from it. From the graves of academe she delivers the ultimate in literary criticism. This seminal satirical study works out convoluted textual analysis and analyzes textual convolutions: included are several treasures like a new Gogol tale (clearly from the hand of the master) and an undoubted story by Dostoevsky (from the hand of the same master). Along with many footnotes and shameless wordplay, there's real verisimilitude to what might, at first glance, pass for a junior college's selection of an appropriate sophomore textbook. All of the Russias is a large target, and this spoof hits it. Unfortunately, other traits of Russian letters (feckless torpor and ennui) emerge in the appended material of comments regarding the Russian language, some faux advertising, a spotty chronology, and a comic dictionary (festooned with much doggerel) in the mode of Flaubert and Bierce. Chudo would have done well to recall her reference to a 19th-century novel so tedious that even its translator didn't read it. Nevertheless, the main text, often as nimble as Nijinsky, disses the Slavs in a manner that will certainly cause a lot of academic hilarity and possibly, as an American-Zionist provocation, a major diplomatic incident. Despite an underdone potato or two, this rich comic serving of borscht will be deemed savory by many a Department of Russian Studies. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0810117886
• ISBN 13: 9780810117884
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248
• Editor: Sobesednikov Andrew