Best of
Russia

1987

Children of the Arbat


Anatoli Rybakov - 1987
    Reissue.

The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays


Vasily Grossman - 1987
    The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as “Mama,” based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father’s downfall. The girl grows up struggling with the discovery that the parents she cherishes in memory are part of a collective nightmare that everyone else wants to forget. The Road also includes the complete text of Grossman’s harrowing report from Treblinka, one of the first anatomies of the workings of a death camp; “The Sistine Madonna,” a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life. Meticulously edited and presented by Robert Chandler, The Road allows us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.

Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories


Anton Chekhov - 1987
    6Ariadne The House with an AtticIonychThe DarlingThe Lady with the LapdogAnton Pavlovich Chekhov may be likened to his contemporaries, the "pointilliste" painters. Piece by piece, episode by episode, character by character, he constructs in prose a survey of the human condition. As David Magarshack writes in his introduction, on reading these stories 'one gets the impression of holding life itself, like a fluttering bird, in one's cupped hands'.

All My Fortunes


Judith Saxton - 1987
    All she knows is that they marked the end of life as she knew it - and a new beginning in the Russian Caucasus.Meanwhile on Deeside, young David Thomas's carefree existence is torn apart by a shipping tragedy which will colour his whole life.A decade later David, now an engineer and working in Russia, meets the young Pavel, just as she is emerging into womanhood. But Russia in the 1930s is no place for young lovers and the story of their struggle to be together is a powerful tale of emotion, adventure, unbelievable hardship and ultimate triumph.

A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union


Rick Smolan - 1987
    As the Soviet people looked back on decades of war and famine, conquest and achievement, and forward to sweeping changes during a time of new leadership and openness, the photographers were granted unprecedented access to homes, factories, schools and even prisons. They traveled to all 15 Soviet republics and across 11 time zones. They ventured into areas that have been closed to outsiders for centuries, and they came back with candid images of the daily life of the people behind the headlines, capturing a lost Soviet era, the twilight of a country.

Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia


Jan Tomasz Gross - 1987
    His lucid analysis of the revolution that came to Poland from abroad is based on hundreds of first-hand accounts of the hardship, suffering, and social chaos that accompanied the Sovietization of this poorest section of a poverty-stricken country. Woven into the author's exploration of events from the Soviet's German-supported aggression against Poland in September of 1939 to Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, these testimonies not only illuminate his conclusions about the nature of totalitarianism but also make a powerful statement of their own. Those who endured the imposition of Soviet rule and mass deportations to forced resettlement, labor camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union are here allowed to speak for themselves, and they do so with grim effectiveness.

Life Of Tolstoy (Wordsworth Literary Lives)


Aylmer Maude - 1987
    With the aid of his wife, Louise, Maude began the task of translating Tolstoy's works into English and the twenty-one volumes of the Tolstoy Centenary Edition is one of the monumental achievements of modern translation.

Words Of Wisdom: Russian Folk Tales From Alexander Afanasiev's Collection


Alexander Afanasyev - 1987
    

Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom


Peter Kolchin - 1987
    The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Peter Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this magisterial book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in comparative perspective.These differences involved both the masters and the bondsmen. The independence and resident mentality of American slaveholders facilitated the emergence of a vigorous crusade to defend slavery from outside attack, whereas an absentee orientation and dependence on the central government rendered serfholders unable successfully to defend serfdom. Russian serfs, who generally lived on larger holdings than American slaves and faced less immediate interference in their everyday lives, found it easier to assert their communal autonomy but showed relatively little solidarity with peasants outside their own villages; American slaves, by contrast, were both more individualistic and more able to identify with all other blacks, both slave and free.Kolchin has discovered apparently universal features in master-bondsman relations, a central focus of his study, but he also shows their basic differences as he compares slave and serf life and chronicles patterns of resistance. If the masters had the upper hand, the slaves and serfs played major roles in shaping, and setting limits to, their own bondage.This truly unprecedented comparative work will fascinate historians, sociologists, and all social scientists, particularly those with an interest in comparative history and studies in slavery.

Beyond the Limit


Irina Ratushinskaya - 1987
    English translations accompany the original Russian texts of poems about conscience, imprisonment, exile, survival, hope, despair, betrayal, winter, and freedom.

5000 Russian Words: With All Their Inflected Forms and Other Grammatical Information : A Russian-English Dictionary With an English-Russian Word Ind


Richard L. Leed - 1987
    Please search for 0-89357-170-9 or 5000 Russian Words Book+Software Package set.

A History of Russian Thought


William J. Leatherbarrow - 1987
    Understanding its intellectual tradition and the way the intelligentsia have shaped the nation is crucial to understanding the Russia of today. This new history examines important intellectual and cultural currents (the Enlightenment, nationalism, nihilism, and religious revival) and key themes (conceptions of the West and East, the common people, and attitudes to capitalism and natural science) in Russian intellectual history. Concentrating on the Golden Age of Russian thought in the mid nineteenth century, the contributors also look back to its eighteenth-century origins in the flowering of culture following the reign of Peter the Great, and forward to the continuing vitality of Russia's classical intellectual tradition in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. With brief biographical details of over fifty key thinkers and an extensive bibliography, this book provides a fresh, comprehensive overview of Russian intellectual history.

The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1900-1941): Its State and Status


George Y. Shevelov - 1987
    Prior to World War I, the Ukraine was divided between the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. The standard language lacked uniformity even though the primacy of the standard established in Russian-dominated Ukraine was theoretically accepted in Austrian-ruled Galicia and Bukovina. Up to 1905 the tsarist government forbade the public use of Ukrainian beyond belles-lettres, and excluded it from education until 1917. In the interwar period the country was divided among the USSR, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, and social and cultural conditions differed drastically. Shevelov's book, based on extensive study of factual material, traces the development of Modern Standard Ukrainian in relation to the political, legal, and cultural conditions within each region. It examines the relation of the standard language to the underlying dialects, the ways in which the standard language was enriched, and the complex struggle for the unity of the language and sometimes for its very existence. While shunning excess linguistic terminology, the book presents the essentials of linguistic development in connection with broad political and cultural conditions.

Talking about God is Dangerous: The Diary of a Russian Dissident


Tatiana Goricheva - 1987
    

Velimir Khlebnikov: A Critical Study


Raymond Cooke - 1987
    Cooke provides the first broad study in English of Khlebnikov's writings. The book is both informative and interpretative, and maps the contours of Khlebnikov's still largely uncharted poetic world. This exploration highlights the complex relationship between the poet and his public, examines Khlebnikov's preoccupations with the meaning of language and images of war and conflict, and cites the transformation of a poet-warrior into the poet-prophet. Cooke also discusses the vexing question of Khlebnikov's attitude toward manuscripts and book concepts.

Political Culture And Leadership In Soviet Russia: From Lenin To Gorbachev


Robert C. Tucker - 1987
    . . .Of the rash of Gorbachev books that have appeared in the last three years, Tucker's is the most thought-provoking and original, the one that best equips us to understand what is at stake in perestroika over the long haul." --Thane Gustafson, Georgetown University, in the New Republic

Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860-1914


Dietrich Geyer - 1987
    By far the most perceptive, knowledgeable, and intelligent work on the last half century of imperial Russia in print.-Theodore H. Von Laue, Russian History This important, tightly packed book ...analyzes the basic problems of Russian imperialism thoroughly and with enormous erudition...Scholars concerned with imperialism and Russian domestic and foreign problems will welcome this thought-provoking work.-David MacKenzie, American Historical Review A convincing and important analysis of the mutual dependence of autocratic domestic and foreign politics...This book ought to be the occasion for a renewed and wide discussion of Russian imperialism and should give rise to further studies of the question.-Alan Kimball, Slavic Review This is a remarkably good book. Good in many respects-quality of research and writing, breadth of view, command of the facts, balance and penetrating in judgment, familiarity with relevant theory...The book represents a revived and deepened historicism.-Paul W.Schroeder, Journal of Modern History Geyer presents a detailed and integrated chronological analysis of the interaction between domestic and international developments under the last three Tsars.-Choice In the historians' art of analytic synthesis he has no peer among specialists in Russian history.-Theodore H. Von Laue, Slavic Review