It is here that agents are brought to be trained, disciplined, and when necessary, broken.In shocking fashion, Suvorov recounts the first day of training when he is forced to watch a film that shows a disaffected GRU agent being burned alive. This is how the GRU reveals to its trainees that there is only one way out of the organization – death. Other GRU methods are as physically torturous as the viewing of that film is terrifying: electric shocks used to punish a failure of memory; being pushed off a speeding train; hand-to-hand combat with death row prisoners recruited for their viciousness. All are employed in the training of a top agent.It is the agent's job – once he is in the field – to gather information in any way he can. No source of information is too small or too banal. Agents of the GRU are said to have attended every exhibition on the planet in the last fifty years – from exhibits of military electronics and tanks to cats and flowers, with one of their most successful missions carried out at an exhibition of Chinese goldfish. Above all else, loyalty to the GRU is stressed. Agents are to trust no one and to be prepared to take even the life of a best friend for an act against the GRU. Gradually, Suvorov became disillusioned with the GRU, and it was when he was forced to betray one of his best friends that he made up his mind to defect.

    In the ensuing years, a brutal Soviet campaign of confiscations, terrorizing, and murder spread throughout Ukrainian villages. What food remained after the seizures was insufficient to support the population. In the resulting famine as many as seven million Ukrainians starved to death.This poignant eyewitness account of the Ukrainian famine by one of the survivors relates the young Miron Dolot's day-to-day confrontation with despair and death—his helplessness as friends and family were arrested and abused—and his gradual realization, as he matured, of the absolute control the Soviets had over his life and the lives of his people. But it is also the story of personal dignity in the face of horror and humiliation. And it is an indictment of a chapter in the Soviet past that is still not acknowledged by Russian leaders.

    Hailed by his contemporaries and by later writers and scholars as the creative genius behind the Russian Futurist movement, Khlebnikov is famous more for his inaccessibility than for the excellence of what he actually produced. Even Russians are generally baffled by him.Now, in a powerful American rendition, we are given access to the strange and beautiful world of Khlebnikov, "the word's wild highwayman." Trained in the natural sciences and mathematics and by temperament an artist, Khlebnikov thought he had discovered the Laws of Time and Tables of Destiny, by which enlightened humans could live in harmony with themselves and with nature. He coined the terms "Futurian" and "Presidents of Planet Earth" for himself and his friends, and he devoted all of his short, restless life to finding a language appropriate to his vision. Experiments with words became magical paths to a reinvigorated future, and produced some of the most extraordinary poems in the Russian language.These goals and researches were variously embodied as well in stories, plays, and visionary essays in which Khlebnikov advances architectural plans for mobile cities, a new alphabet based on universal meanings of sounds, and communication by way of vast television networks. The result is poetry of startling originality, modernity, and linguistic virtuosity--a true challenge to translators and one that has been met brilliantly here by Paul Schmidt and Charlotte Douglas.The King of Time is a representative sampling of Khlebnikov's writings, taken from the translation of his complete works prepared under the auspices of the Dia Art Foundation. It includes many pieces, among them the full text of the astounding poem-play Zangezi, never before translated. General readers will be introduced to the legendary Khlebnikov, and cognoscenti will applaud the inventiveness of the rendering.

    It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy; and poetry by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam.

    A winner of the Isaac Deutscher Prize Liebmann highlights democratic dimensions in Lenin's thinking as it developed over 25 years.

    Stephen Cartwright's bright and amusing pictures encourage direct association of the Russian word with the object for effective, long-term learning. At the end of the book there is a full Russian/English list of all the words in the book, with an easy-to-use pronunciation guide for each word. ("Another winner from this bright, imaginative publishing house." The Yorkshire Post) Hardcover. Pages: 64

    An illustrated collection of thirty-three traditional tales from Russia.

    Kjetsaa vividly recreates Dostoyevsky's last-minute rescue from a firing squad and explores how his long imprisonment in Siberia profoundly shaped his vision as a novelist.

    Here, in the largest one-volume collection available, are 36 stories of war, intrigue, treachery, murder, moral turmoil, spiritual anguish, and occasional redemption. They include early stories like the famed "Sevastopol" tales of warfare and "Lost on the Steppe;" the tour de force novellas "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch" and "The Kreutzer Sonata;" as well as folk tales, parables, realistic tales, and many lesser-known gems.

    A collection of stories from Russian folklore organized into chapters dealing with such subjects as giants & midgets, serpents & dragons, and blacksmiths & ploughmen.

    Despite its great potential and remarkable achievements, the country also bore the weight of two world wars, a revolution and civil war, totalitarian tyranny, famine and ecological destruction, economic ruin, and imperial decline. Will Russia ever be prosperous, peaceful, and free? Seeking clues in the past, Michael Kort revisits earlier turning points in Russia's history--from the fall of the old regime to the establishment of the Bolshevik dictatorship and Stalinist totalitarianism; from the reforms and counter-reforms of Khrushchev and Brezhnev to the tumultuous years of change under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Which strands of Russia's past is their successor, Vladimir Putin, weaving into the fabric of the present, and which are being allowed to fade, for better or worse? This new edition of The Soviet Colossus brings the story up through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Distinctively readable, judicious, and focused on critical events and questions, it integrates new revelations about the Soviet past and ongoing debates about the Soviet regime as well as its successor. It is the ideal text for as one semester history course or background for a political science course.

    The illustrations include Pushkin's drawings, portraits of the poet, his relatives and his friends, and pictures of places associated with his name.

    Supplementing close textual analysis with material drawn from Bely's theoretical and autobiographical writings, Alexandrov traces in detail how this conception evolved from four early experimental prose narratives to the major novels, and how it is manifested in their themes, form, and style. Alexandrov also provides lucid discussions of the significant influence that several philosophical and occult systems had on Bely's art, and of the theoretical problem of what constitutes a Symbolist novel.

    His stature in the West has evolved, from the 1962 publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich through his remarks upon receiving the 1983 Templeton Award for Progress in Religion. Solzhenitsyn in Exile rises out of the aiding interest in Solzhenitsyn: the political image, the writer, and the man. There are four aspects to this volume: the change in attitude toward Solzhenitsyn in the West after his expulsion from the USSR; literary criticism of his oeuvre since his expulsion from Russia; newly translated memoirs and interviews; and bibliographies of works about Solzhenitsyn and his writings. In 1974, when Solzhenitsyn was ejected from the Soviet Union and arrived in the West, the popular image of him was one of admiration for his courage and his talent. Over time, this picture changed, especially after his 1978 address at Harvard University. The dimension and motivation for these changes in England, the United States, France, West Germany, and Yugoslavia are explored, together with Michael Nicholson's essay on his image worldwide. There are eight critical essays. Six focus on specific works: The Gulag Archipelago, its form, diction, and narrative structure; the place in literature of The Calf and the Oak; the changes in meaning among the different redactions of The First Circle; and an exegesis of Solzhenitsyn's long poem, Prussian Nights. Two essays explore Solzhenitsyn in his literary context, one reviewing his intellectual antecedents in Russian literature, the other the continuity in his ethical thought. Before his Soviet expulsion, Solzhenitsyn censored himself, as well as submitting to the censorship of the state; many of his works exist in multiple forms. Therefore, bibliographies linking one edition to the next, and delineating the process of change, are important both to scholars and laymen. The annotated bibliography of works about Solzhenitsyn is confined to books in Russian, English, German, or French. It is divided in three parts: books on Solzhenitsyn as a contributor to political dialogue; dictionaries of Solzhenitsyn's language, and literary criticism and biographical works. Michael Nicholson's annotated bibliography of Solzhenitsyn's works discusses questions of dating, textual authenticity, censorship, and self-censorship.

    Throughout this book, Kenez is more concerned with the experience of the Soviet people than with high-level politics. The book is both a major contribution to our understanding of the genius of the Soviet state, and of the nature of propaganda in the modern world.

    Theoharis, Christian Science Monitor“A vast and informative compilation…. The magnificent panorama of Russian literature accumulatively unfolds, from its ancient folklore and earliest written texts… to our present century’s structuralism, modernism, and socialist realism.”—Gordon McVay, Times Higher Education Supplement“For anyone interested in Russian literature, this new Handbook is the single most useful book to own.”—J. Thomas Shaw, Slavic and East European Journal“An indispensable source of concise information for all students of literature for years to come.”—Ray Parrott, Philological Quarterly