Paul Friedrich

"This book explores and interprets the myriad connections between two spiritual classics, Henry David Thoreau's Walden and the Bhagavad-Gita. Evidence shows that Thoreau took the Gita with him when he moved to Walden Pond, and the books have much in common, touching on ultimate ethical and metaphysical questions. Paul Friedrich looks at how each work speaks to fundamental problems of good and evil, self and cosmos, duty and passion, reality and illusion, political engagement and philosophical meditation, sensuous wildness and ascetic devotion. His examination moves through several stages, from an analysis of key symbols, such as the upside-down tree, to an exposition of social, ethical, and metaphysical values, to a consideration of the many sources of these syncretic works."--BOOK JACKET.

This innovative work from Paul Friedrich surveys the Russian lyric scene from the mid-eighteenth century through the Modern period, in terms of the poets' own ideas as well as the author's interpretations. Such themes as poetic craft, musicality, creativity, sociopolitical context, and multilingualism as musical competence, are discussed and interrelated through their variations in twenty-one of Russia's finest tyric poets, and then integrated through two "recapitulations." Combining broad theoretical perspectives with numerous detailed readings of key poems, Friedrich synthesizes recent Russian research with Western criticism to advance a unique series of hypotheses and generalizations. Music in Russian Poetry is an indispensable tool for students of Russian lyric poetry, particularly its musical aspects, and will also be of value for those interested in comparative, structural, (auto)-biographical and musicological approaches to lyric poetry and poetic culture.

Argues that the "locus and focus" of differences among languages lies not so much in practical or rational aspects as in the complexity and richness of more poetic dimensions--in the nuances of words, or the style and voice of an author. This poetic reformulation of what has been called "linguistic relativism" is grounded in the author's theory of the imagination as a main source of poetic indeterminacy and, ultimately, disorder and chaos.

This book is about the origin and growth of agrarian regorm and agrarian politics, the formation of an agrarian ideilogy and of the techniques of agrarian revolt, and the lices of real persons in their relation to state politics.