At the age of thirty-one, Nerzhin has survived the war years on the German front and the postwar years in a succession of Russian prisons and labor camps. His story is interwoven with the stories of a dozen fellow prisoners - each an unforgettable human being - from the prison janitor to the tormented Marxist intellectual who designed the Dnieper dam; of the reigning elite and their conflicted subordinates; and of the women, wretched or privileged, bound to these men. A landmark of Soviet literature, 'The First Circle' is as powerful today as it was when it was first published, nearly thirty years ago.

    On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state—or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps . . . and almost certain death.First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece. In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes—including nine full chapters—were cut or altered before it was published in a hastily translated English edition in 1968. Now with the help of the author's most trusted translator, Harry T. Willetts, here for the first time is the complete, definitive English edition of Solzhenitsyn's powerful and magnificent classic.

    Harrison Salisbury called it "brilliant...not only an odyssey of madness, tragedy, and sadism, but a work of scholarship and literary craftsmanship." And in recent years it has received equally high praise in the former Soviet Union, where it is now considered the definitive account of the period. When Conquest wrote the original volume, he relied heavily on unofficial sources. With the advent of glasnost, an avalanche of new material became available, and Conquest mined this enormous cache to write, in 1990, a substantially new edition of his classic work, adding enormously to the detail. Both a leading historian and a highly respected poet, Conquest blends profound research with evocative prose, providing not only an authoritative account of Stalin's purges, but also a compelling and eloquent chronicle of one of this century's most tragic events. He provides gripping accounts of everything from the three great "Moscow Trials," to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, life in the labor camps, and many other key matters. On the fortieth anniversary of the first edition, in the light of further archival releases, and new material published in Moscow and elsewhere, it remains remarkable how many of Conquest's most disturbing conclusions have continued to bear up. This volume, featuring a new preface by Conquest, rounds out the picture of this huge historical tragedy, further establishing the book as the key study of one of the twentieth centurys most lethal, and longest-misunderstood,offenses against humanity.

    His stories give expression to the bewildered experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920's and `30s, beset by an acute housing shortage, ubiquitous theft and corruption, and the impenetrable new ideological language of the Soviet state. Written in the semi-educated talk of the man or woman on the street, these stories enshrine one of the greatest achievements of the people of the Soviet Union—their gallows humor. Housing block tenants who reject electricity because it illuminates their squalor too harshly, a young couple who live in a bathroom, a railway-line manager making a speech against bribery who accidentally mentions his own affinity for kickbacks—in all of Zoschenko's characters, petty materialism is balanced with a poignant faith in the revolutionary project. Zoschenko, the self-described "temporary substitute for the proletarian writer," combines wicked satire and an earthy empathy with a brilliance that places him squarely in the classic Russian comic tradition. Jeremy Hick's translation of The Galosh brings together sixty five of Zoschenko's finest short stories—bringing the choice writings of perhaps Soviet Russia's most humorous and moving writer to American readers for the first time.

    The Rudomin family has been arrested by the Russians. They are "capitalists' enemies of the people." Forced from their home and friends in Vilna, Poland, they are herded into crowded cattle cars. Their destination: the endless steppe of Siberia.For five years, Esther and her family live in exile, weeding potato fields and working in the mines, struggling for enough food and clothing to stay alive. Only the strength of family sustains them and gives them hope for the future.

    Rabinowitch documents how the party's pluralistic nature had crucial implications for the outcome of the revolution in October.

    She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her love-lorne and in the grips of a passionate obsession. The search to recapture the love of her life, and the Russia he had planted within her, takes her to Siberia and beyond, journeying deep into the romantic terrain of the mind's eye.

    

    When one sister, Olga, grows impatient, grandmother leaves that girl's stockings unfinished. She teaches Tanya to knit a stocking for her kitten, instead, but Tanya stays up all night to finish Olga's stockings herself.

    

    English translation of von Haxthausen's influential work on Russia, its history and people.

    Its learned account of Russian avant-garde poetics with respect to various forms and genres-poems, plays, artist's books, manifestos-is still the first I turn to when I want to review the critical information about Futurist manifestos or Khlebnikov's long poems and stories, or the collaborations of Goncharova and Kruchenykh. Meticulous and thorough, Markov's book, in this new edition, will be indispensable for students of the avant-garde." - Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University, Scholar-in-Residence, University of Southern California, author of The Futurist Moment. "It is wonderful to have this classic study of Russian Futurism and related movements back in print. Everyone who studies Russian modernism and the avant-garde has used and benefited from it. If any single book can be called 'indispensable' for the study of a period, it is Markov's, and now further generations can have it at hand. It is a book to give the lie to the Futurist �patage 'read this book and destroy!' Keep forever!" - John Malmstad, Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University. "The publication of Russian Futurism: A History almost forty years ago was a major cultural event. That the book is still the most accurate and comprehensive English-language directory to the literature of the Russian avant-garde testifies to the richness and prescience of Vladimir Markov's scholarship." - John Bowlt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California; Director, Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Los Angeles.

    

    Was Tsar Nicholas II the last Emporor of All the Russias really murdered in Ekaterinburg in July 1918?This important volume contains the pertinent parts of a work accepted for many years as the official, authoritative report on the alleged murder of Nicholas II.