Before the revolution, Akhmatova was a wildly popular young poet who lived a bohemian life. She was one of the leaders of a movement of poets whose ideal was “beautiful clarity”—in her deeply personal work, themes of love and mourning are conveyed with passionate intensity and economy, her voice by turns tender and fierce. A vocal critic of Stalinism, she saw her work banned for many years and was expelled from the Writers’ Union—condemned as “half nun, half harlot.” Despite this censorship, her reputation continued to flourish underground, and she is still among Russia’s most beloved poets. Here are poems from all her major works—including the magnificent “Requiem” commemorating the victims of Stalin’s terror—and some that have been newly translated for this edition About The Author: Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko in 1888 and died in 1966. A popular poet of the Acmeist school, she took a pseudonym when her upper-class father objected to her "decadent" choice of career. She was married to the Acmeist poet Gumilev from 1910 until 1918, and spent time in Paris, where she posed nude for Modigliani. After the Revolution, Akhmatova remained silent for two decades. Her ex-husband was executed in 1921, their son was imprisoned for sixteen years, and her third husband died in a Siberian prison camp. She began publishing again at the outbreak of World War II, and her writings regained popularity despite being harshly denounced by the Soviet regime in 1946 and 1957 for "bourgeois decadence." Ejected from the Writers' Union in 1946, she was made its president two years before her death in 1966.

    Over four hundred letters chronicle the author's career, recording his struggles in the publishing world, the battles over "Lolita," and his relationship with his wife.

    This exciting book features some of the best photographs ever made of Faberge objects. Over 350 illustrations, 80 in full color.

    A review of the impact of a work suppressed for thirty years by the Soviet authorities because of its personalized view of the October Revolution in Russia.

    These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism -- years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. Their painful, unsettling eloquence testify to the humane and the comic in this absurdist writer's work. The translator Neil Cornwall gives a biographical introduction to his subject, enlarged upon by the poet Hugh Maxton in a contextual assessment of the writing of Flann O'Brien, Le Fanu and Doyle, and of their shared concerns with detective fiction, terror and death. Daniil Kharms 91905-42) died under Stalin. Along with fellow poets and prose-writers of the era -- Khlebnikov, Biely, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky and Pasternak -- he is one of the emerging experimentalists of Russian modernism.

    This book, the first of a trilogy written by Volkogonov on Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky, takes advantage of the author's discoveries to reveal much heretofore unknown knowledge about Stalin's reign of terror in the early days of the Soviet Union. Photos.

    Larina tells the story not only of her twenty years in the Gulag but of her life as a daughter and a wife among the founding fathers of the Soviet Union.

    It contains such classics as “Babbi Yar,” which forms the centrepiece of Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, “The City of ‘Yes’ and the City of ‘No,’” and “The Heirs of Stalin.”

    Never before translated into English, these memoirs provide the insider’s view of Tsvetaeva’s daughter and "first reader."No Love Without Poetry gives us Efron’s wrenching story of the difficulty of living with genius. The hardships imposed by early twentieth-century Russian political upheaval placed incredible strain on her already fraught, intense relationship with her mother. Efron recounts the family’s travels from Moscow to Germany, to Czechoslovakia, and finally to France, where, against her mother’s advice, Efron decided to return to Russia. Nemec Ignashev draws on new materials, including Efron’s short stories and her mother’s recently published notebooks, to supplement the original memoirs. No Love Without Poetry completes extant historical records on Marina Tsvetaeva and establishes Ariadna Efron as a literary force.

    Ford came across this sentence in a Russian school primer. It stays with him today as an example of the Russian psyche, a psyche that Ford is better equipped to explain than most. He is the only Western diplomat to have known and dealt with all the Soviet leaders from the end of the Second World War to the present: Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev. As a poet and translator of Russian poetry, he also had a special entrée into the Soviet literary world. In this memoir he offers a unique perspective on post-war Soviet politics and Russian life.

    The intrepid reporter saddled up in the spring of 1929, accompanied by an aging, eccentric Englishman who lived in Moscow. With no prior equestrian travel experience between them, the two would-be explorers were soon discovering the harsh realities of life on the road. They were lashed by hailstorms, threatened by skeptical Soviet commissars, denied shelter by suspicious natives, and spent night after night in rain-soaked misery.A personal chronicle of an already exciting life, “Caucasian Journey” tells how Farson also discovered the seldom-seen splendors of this mountainous region with its alpine snowfields painted gold by the sun, picturesque villages forgotten by the outer world, and magnificent horsemen who were practically born in the saddle.A thrilling account and a poetic remembrance, “Caucasian Journey” is an amply illustrated adventure classic.

    How can Hitler and the Holocaust, how can the complicity and shame of the average German be narrated and visualized? How can Auschwitz be reconstructed? Anton Kaes argues that a major shift in German attitudes occurred in the mid-1970s--a shift best illustrated in films of the New German Cinema, which have focused less on guilt and atonement than on personal memory and yearning for national identity.To support his claim, Kaes devotes a chapter to each of five complex and celebrated films of the modern German era: Hans Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany, a provocative restaging of German history in postmodern tableaux; The Marriage of Maria Braun, the personal and political reflection on postwar Germany with which Rainer Werner Fassbinder first caught the attention of American and European audiences; Helma Sanders-Brahms's feminist and autobiographical film Germany, Pale Mother, relating the unexplored role of German women during and after the war; Alexander Kluge's The Patriot, a self-reflexive collage of verbal and visual quotations from the entire course of the German past; and, finally, Edgar Reitz's Heimat, a 16-hour epic rendering of German history from 1918 to the present from the perspective of everyday life in the provinces.Despite radical differences in style and form, these films are all concerned with memory, representation, and the dialogue between past and present Kaes draws from a variety of disciplines, interweaving textual interpretation, cultural history, and current theory to create a dynamic approach to highly complex and multi-voiced films. His book will engage readers interested in postwar German history, politics, and culture; in film and media studies; and in the interplay of history, memory, and film.

    Each of the seven chapters in Part 1 focuses on one aspect of Russian folk belief, such as the pagan background, Christian personages, devils and various other logical categories of the topic. The author's thesis - that Russian folk belief represents a "double faith" whereby Slavic pagan beliefs are overlaid with popular Christianity - is persuasive and has analogies in other cultures. The folk narratives constituting Part 2 are translated and include a wide range of tales, from the briefly anecdotal to the more fully developed narrative, covering the various folk personages and motifs explored in Part 1.

    310 full-color and 20 black-and-white photos.

    First tracing Lenin's personal and political development until his emergence as a leader of Russian Social Democracy, Pomper's psychologically oriented book then introduces Trotsky and Stalin. In each case, he shows the impact of family history and adolescent experience upon political commitment. Though psychoanalytically oriented, this study avoids technical jargon and presents both personal development and political behavior in easily grasped terms.Pomper examines early personal and political traumas and their contribution to matters as diverse as styles of leadership and dialectical method. A historian of the Russian revolutionary movement as well as psycho-biographer, Pomper embeds his subject in the events of late imperial Russia, with special focus on the intersection of the biographies of the three men with processes in the revolutionary subculture and with the mass explosions of 1905 and 1917. Pomper then analyzes the struggles among the Bolshevik oligarchs during the early Soviet period (1917–1924) and the critical months after Lenin's death.Documents in Trotsky's and Max Eastman's archives previously unused by Trotsky's biographers enrich Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power. The author has also exploited valuable new information on Lenin, Stalin, and the history of the CSPU provided in official Soviet publications and the published writings of émigrés and dissidents. A widely known scholar of Russian and Soviet history, Pomper is the first historian in decades systematically to integrate the lives of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in a single study. His skillful integration of these three figures, his original interpretations, and his lucid writing style make Philip Pomper's Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin engaging, illuminating, and significant.

    

    Here is an enthralling portrait of this poor but sizable population on the eve of the uprising; of the breakdown of state power in the countryside; and, most important, of the relationship between the serfs and the Bolsheviks during the civil war. An enlightening approach, illustrated with disturbing contemporary images.

    Anatoly Marchenko was a working class Soviet dissident, who died for his beliefs at the hands of the Soviet state. In this poignant memoir, Marchenko completes a remarkable series of autobiographical works which started with "My Testimony" and continued with "From Tarusa to Chuna". Born to a provincial railway worker's family in Siberia, Marchenko experienced a brutish upbringing. Driven by a passionate desire to expose the seamy underside of Soviet society, he became a human-rights activist, and began his epic battle with the Soviet authorities. This is his memoir of that battle. It provides a rare insight into a world inhabited by those who live "where the asphalt ends". An afterword by Lisa Bogoraz, Marclienko's wife, completes this document of a life spent in dissent. Anatoly Marchenko was the first dissident to expose the post-Stalin system of camps and prisons. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Chistopol prison in 1986, after spending 20 of his 48 years in the Soviet penal system.

    He calls in evidence literature - Pasternak, Djlias, Solzhenitsyn, and political figures, such as Sakharov, Lenin and Kremlinologists, to form critical theories about the Soviet Union and its writings.

    

    Librarian's Note: The ISBN 5050024331 for this book was also used by "Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore and Other Stories" by Chinghiz Aitmatov.