The World of Nabokov's Stories (Literary Modernism Series)

Explores how Nabokov eclipsed the achievements of Russian masters of the short story, Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin, while in exile from Russia and his native tradition, drawing on unpublished manuscripts and letters. Analyzes the paradigms of Nabokov's poetics and tests them in studies of major stories, delineates the principle historical and cultural texts that shaped his development, and investigates his dialogue with Chekhov and Bunin on the use of narrative closure and the nature of love. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Literature & Fiction

Shrayer, Maxim D.

History & Criticism

University of Texas Press

A century after his birth, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) remains controversial, provocative, and "cool." Yet while he receives acclaim as a major American writer, few of his admirers in the West know the unique place he occupies in his native Russian tradition. In this comprehensive study of Nabokov's short fiction, Maxim D. Shrayer explores how Nabokov eclipsed the achievements of the great Russian masters of the short story, Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin, with whom he maintained a dialogic relationship even as he became--in exile from Russia and his native tradition--an American writer. Drawing on Nabokov's unpublished manuscripts and letters, Shrayer analyzes the paradigms of Nabokov's poetics and tests them in studies of representative stories. He investigates Nabokov's dialogue with Chekhov and his rivalry with Bunin. This in-depth analysis places Nabokov's short fiction in the main line of his writing career. Through references to all of Nabokov's stories, as well as to many novels and discursive writings, from the early émigré works of the 1920s to the late American works of the 1970s, Shrayer delineates the principal historical and cultural contexts that shaped Nabokov's development. Most importantly, he reveals the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic concerns that shaped one of the most significant bodies of modern fiction.

In 1987 a young Jewish man, the central figure in this captivating book, leaves Moscow for good with his parents. They celebrate their freedom in opulent Vienna and spend two months in Rome and the coastal resort of Ladispoli. While waiting in Europe for a U.S. refugee visa, the book’s twenty-year-old poet quenches his thirst for sexual and cultural discovery. Through his colorful Austrian and Italian misadventures, he experiences the shock, thrill, and anonymity of encountering Western democracies, running into European roadblocks while shedding Soviet social taboos. As he anticipates entering a new life in America, he movingly describes the baggage that exiles bring with them, from the inescapable family traps and ties to the sweet cargo of memory. An emigration story, Waiting for America explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of a new, American life. Told in a revelatory first-person narrative, Waiting for America is also a vibrant love story in which the romantic main character is torn between Russian and Western women. Filled with poignant humor and reinforced by hope and idealism, the author’s confessional voice carries the reader in the same way one is carried through literary memoirs like Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Babel, Sebald, and Singer―all transcultural masters of identity writing―are the coordinates that help to locate Waiting for America on the greater map of literature.

Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Syracuse University Press

Whether set in Maxim D. Shrayer’s native Russia or in North America and Western Europe, the eight stories in this collection explore emotionally intricate relationships that cross traditional boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and culture. Tracing the lives, obsessions, and aspirations of Jewish-Russian immigrants, these poignant, humorous, and tender stories create an expansive portrait of individuals struggling to come to terms with ghosts of their European pasts while simultaneously seeking to build new lives in their American present. The title story follows Jake Glaz, a young Jewish man apprehensive about marrying a Catholic woman. After realizing Erin will not convert, Jake leaves the United States to spend Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, "a beautiful place for a Jew to atone." In "Sonetchka" a literary scholar and his former girlfriend from Moscow reunite in her suburban Connecticut apartment. As they reminisce about their Soviet youth and quietly admire each other’s professional successes, both wrestle with the curious mix of prosperity, loneliness, and insecurity that defines their lives in the United States. Yom Kippur in Amsterdam takes the immigrant narrative into the twenty-first century. Emerging from the traditions of Isaac Babel, Vladimir Nabokov, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shrayer’s vibrant literary voice significantly contributes to the evolution of Jewish writing in America.

Yom Kippur in Amsterdam: Stories (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

United States

Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy's confessional trilogy and Nabokov's autobiography, Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is a searing account of growing up a Jewish refusenik, of a young poet's rebellion against totalitarian culture, and of Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War. Shrayer's remembrances ore set against a rich backdrop of politics, travel, and ethnic conflict on the brink of the Soviet empire's collapse. His moving story offers generous doses of humor and tenderness, counterbalanced with longing and violence.

Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

Arts & Literature

I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History)

In this ground-breaking book, based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch, and thereafter composed and published poems about it. Shrayer painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin’s regime increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings and actions. This book features over 60 rare photographs and illustrations and includes translations of Selvinsky’s principal Shoah poems.

Academic Studies Press

In his captivating new book, based on new evidence and a series of interviews, author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer offers a richly journalistic portrait of Russia’s dwindling yet still vibrant and influential Jewish community. This is simultaneously an in-depth exploration of the texture of Jewish life in Putin’s Russia and an émigré’s moving elegy for Russia’s Jews, which forty years ago constituted one of the world’s largest Jewish populations and which presently numbers only about 180,000. Why do Jews continue to live in Russia after the antisemitism and persecution they had endured there? What are the prospects of Jewish life in Russia? What awaits the children born to Jews who have not left? "With or Without You" asks and seeks to answer some of the central questions of modern Jewish history and culture.

With or Without You: The Prospect for Jews in Today’s Russia

History

Russia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shrayer, Maxim D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shrayer, Maxim D.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shrayer, Maxim D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The World of Nabokov's Stories (Literary Modernism Series)

The World of Nabokov's Stories (Literary Modernism Series)

Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

Yom Kippur in Amsterdam: Stories (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History)

I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History)

With or Without You: The Prospect for Jews in Today’s Russia