Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announces grant for reissuing and promoting 42 Slavic Studies titles as free ebooks

The Borderlines Foundation is thrilled to announce that it has been awarded, in collaboration with Academic Studies Press (ASP), a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities to reissue and market 42 of ASP's previously published titles in Slavic studies as freely available open-access ebooks. The grant is part of the NEH-Mellon Humanities Open Book initiative. In addition to the free ebooks, ASP has also released new, low-cost paperback editions of each book. We are excited to collaborate with Academic Studies Press on this tremendous opportunity to distribute some of their most excellent previously published titles.

Click on the title below to view the full book. | See PDF catalog here.

As part of this grant, Borderlines Foundation has prepared a white paper detailing the project and its results. See the PDF white paper here.

The New Eighteenth Century

As the editors of the 2016 spring edition of Kritika noted, “To an earlier generation of historians, the 18th century was precisely one of becoming, and it was from this vantage point that they addressed such questions as the nature of autocracy, secularization, the transfer of Western ideas and customs, deepening social stratification, and the formation of the modern state, with its growing emphasis placed on legislation and legal norms. Younger scholars are drawn to the same questions, though with a greater eye to the institutions and beliefs that the 18th century did not outlive.” These titles provide a foundational understanding of the eighteenth century that both grounds historiographical and literary studies and provokes new inquiries into the multiple legacies of this age, whose ambiguities continue to be unpacked by new generations of students.

Rediscovering the Russian Canon

The traditional Russian literary canon remains the first point of entry into Russian studies for many students, and often the start of a post-graduation reengagement with fiction for the general audience, as attested by the new and overlapping translations of major works into English in the past decade. ASP’s foundational works of literary criticism are significant touchstones for students and instructors, and their wider availability will make them helpful resources for new and returning readers.

Judaism and Its Interlocutors

The past decade has seen a wellspring of innovative and important scholarship in East European and Jewish Studies, reshaping traditional understandings (and challenging binary readings) of both “halves” of the field. These various titles contribute to the growing literature in history, literary analysis, personal memoir, and religious studies that seeks to recover and to reimagine historical narratives of Jewish life in the region.

Vernacular Modernisms

This capacious (and somewhat enigmatic) category comprises volumes that examine the period from (roughly) the 1890s (c.f. Soloviev) through the “last Modernist” (Iosif Brodskii). Its notion of modernism is dubbed “vernacular” in the sense that it highlights an inventory of particularist and even peripheral concerns: a minor figure of Russian Symbolism, émigré Modernism, Modernism’s intellectual (rather than artistic) debates (the Vekhi Symposium), and Soviet (rather than hegemonic Western European) variants of Modernism.

Reading and Rereading Nabokov

As one of the most recognizable and widely read Russian authors—indeed, one of the most popular writers regardless of origin—Vladimir Nabokov is a central figure in both standard Western educations and in the personal biographies of many avid readers. Nabokov studies continues to grow and innovate, and ASP’s titles on his major works and his life and oeuvre more broadly serve as accessible and productive companions to this major author.

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