An admired contemporary of Rilke, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva bore witness to the turmoil and devastation of the Revolution, and chronicled her difficult life in exile, sustained by the inspiration and power of her modern verse.The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

    It discloses a little-known tradition of absurdism that persisted during the Stalinist period, a testimony to both the hardiness of the Russian imagination in the face of socialist realism and the vitality of an important cultural and literary tradition.

     “IN THIS BOOK I have described my personal experiences only to the extent that they were the characteristic experiences of a prisoner in the Soviet Union. For my concern is not primarily with the foreigners in Soviet camps; it is rather with the fate of all the peoples who have been subjugated by the Soviet regime, who were born in a Soviet Republic and cannot escape from it. The events I describe are the daily experiences of thousands or people in the Soviet Union. They are the findings of an involuntary expedition into an unknown land: the land of Soviet prisoners, of the guiltless damned. From that region I have brought back with me the silence of the Siberian graveyards, the deathly silence of those who have frozen, starved, or been beaten to death. This book is an attempt to make that silence speak.”-from the Author’s Preface.

    Faety (The Destruction of Faena), is a novel by Alexander Kazantsev, in which the asteroid belt is the debris of Faena, the fifth planet of the Solar System located just between Mars and Jupiter.

    Victor Serge’s final work, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.The novel is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D’s friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

    Marya's journey into Siberian exile turns into a dash for freedom in the arms of strong and silent Boris Branov — ostensibly an agent of the Tsar's secret police, actually an unreconstructed Decembrist devoted to rescuing political prisoners.

    But his political vision had deep spiritual roots. Dostoevsky's searing struggle with the question of God is famously presented in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.

    Long identified with leftist causes, the journalist Eugene Lyons was by background and sentiment predisposed to early support of the Russian Revolution. A "friendly correspondent," he was one of a coterie of foreign journalists permitted into the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era because their desire to serve the revolution was thought to outweigh their desire to serve the truth. Lyons first went to the Soviet Union in 1927, and spent six years there. He was there as Stalin consolidated his power, through collectivization and its consequences, as the cultural and technical intelligentsia succumbed to the secret police, and as the mechanisms of terror were honed. As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this edition, "It was this murderous reality that Stalin's censors worked so assiduously to camouflage, corralling foreign correspondents as their often willing allies." Lyons was one of those allies.Assignment in Utopia describes why he refused to see the obvious, the forces that kept him from writing the truth, and the tortuous path he traveled in liberating himself. His story helps us understand how so many who were in a position to know were so silent for so long. In addition, it is a document, by an on-the-scene journalist, of major events in the critical period of the first Five-Year Plan.As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this new edition, Assignment in Utopia is particularly timely. The system it dissects in such devastating detail is in the process of being rejected throughout Eastern Europe and is under challenge in the Soviet Union itself. The book lends insight into the "political pilgrim" phenomenon described by Paul Hollander, in which visitors celebrate terrorist regimes, seemingly oblivious to their destructive force. The book is valuable for those interested in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, those interested in radical regimes and political change, as well as those interested in better understanding current events in Europe. It will also be useful for the tough questions it poses about journalistic ethics.

    Drawing on family diaries, on the contemplation of intriguing photographs in an old family album, and on stories passed down from father to son, he comes to terms with the meaning of his family's memories and histories. Focusing on his grandparents, Count Paul Ignatieff and Princess Natasha Mestchersky, he recreates their lives before, during, and after the Russian Revolution.

    It awarded to the survivors (and to some who did not) the Medal for Defense of Leningrad.So far as I know it played no favorites in this. Those who had chanced to come through alive got the medal (many of them to their great surprise). In all more than 300,000 medals were passed out-- and it may sound like a very large total. But when you consider the fact that something like 3,300,000 persons were trapped within the siege lines when the long blockade began on September 8, 1941, the number is not so large. Of course, between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 persons died during the siege--of hunger, of cold, of disease, of German bullets, bombs, and shells.All of this Elena Skrjabina has experienced. She has no Medal of Leningrad. But she possesses a distinction which is as rare as any human being possesses. She "is a "Leningrader. She endured the siege. She came out over Lake Ladoga-- not alone. She brought her mother, two children and an old nurse with her. She did not emerge without loss; her mother died. Her mother survived the bitter days of the siege. She even lived through December 1941, and January 1942, into February 1942. She survived the trip across the ice. But once on the other side, her strength was gone. She endured a few days in the hospital. Not more. Then she slipped away from life as hundreds of thousands of her fellow Leningraders had before her.

    Crucial to the understanding of this theoretical movement, this collection of essays by and about the Russian Formalists features work by: - Boris M. Eichenbaum ("The Theory of the Formal Method") - Viktor Shklvosky ("The Mystery Novel: Dickens's Little Dorrit") - Roman Jakobson ("On Realism in Art") - Mikhail Bakhtin ("Discourse Typology in Prose") - Osip M. Brik ("Contributions to the Study of Verse Language") A new introduction by Gerald L. Bruns provides a context for understanding why these works remain as important and influential now as when they were first written.