One night the stepmother sends Vasilisa to visit Baba Yaga, an errand from which the gentle girl has little chance of returning alive. "An engaging text and accomplished paintings set this version apart....A stylized and classy offering."--School Library Journal.

    In 1991, Adam Hochschild spent nearly six months in Russia talking to gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, and countless others. The result is a riveting evocation of a country still haunted by the ghost of Stalin.

    Rich in surprising encounters and vivid characters, Between East and West brilliantly illuminates the soul of these lands and the shaping power of their past.

    The first major book on Alexandra in 30 years, this definitive work presents an unbiased account of the empress's life, including her dominant role in Russian politics and her involvement with the infamous Rasputin.

    Even so, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system. In 1990, he went public, exposing the intelligence agency's shadowy methods. Revised and updated in the light of the KGB's enduring presence in Russian politics, Spymaster is Kalugin's impressively illuminating memoir of the final years of the Soviet Union.

    "A highly fluent narrative with the heft and density of history and the emotional resonance of fiction."--New York Times.

    As Picasso changed the face of art, Akhmatova would revolutionize the poetic vision of her contemporaries, for it was she who introduced the laconic style of twentieth-century poetry that seemed to blend in with the modernist forces of her age. One of those writers on whom she cast her spell was Nicholas Gumilyov, a swashbuckling Hemingway type, an eminent literary figure in his own right, who became her first husband. On their honeymoon, they went to Paris in 1910, where they met Modigliani, with whom Akhmatova later had an affair, succeeded by other extremely close relationships with the likes of the composer Arthur Lourie and Osip Mandelstam. Akhmatova and Gumilyov's relationship was clearly strained from the start, and the two, in a love-hate style, tortured each other until their divorce in 1918. Only after Gumilyov was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921 did Akhmatova realize how much he had meant to her. Friend and protector of writers like Pasternak and Mandelstam in the 1920s and 1950s, she was so lionized by her intellectual peers that even when the Bolsheviks turned on her poetry, the authorities feared to harm or kill her. When Mandelstam, for example, was arrested. Akhmatova was in his apartment, and she did everything she could to save him, before he later went mad and died under mysterious circumstances in 1958. Unlike Mandelstam, Pasternak chose to compromise, and wrote an ode to Lenin and translated other poems to Stalin, becoming for a while the government's literary "golden boy."While Akhmatova was spared the physical torture of others, her son, Lev, was arrested several times, the authorities believing that she could be tortured through her son's imprisonment. As an artist and mother, she reacted to her trauma by composing a cycle of poems about suffer

    An archer overcomes the machinations of a cruel czar with the help of an enchanted dove.

    Bring me the Firebird, or I swear by my sword, your head will no longer sit upon your shoulders!A retelling of a popular Russian folktaleDemi's retelling captures the charm and drama of this favorite Russian folktale, while her lavish, gilded illustrations vividly evoke the grand setting and daring adventures.

    Combining personal and professional reminiscences, the interpreter for both Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov offers firsthand observations from the Soviet perspective of the events of World War II, including the historic meetings where the Allies united against Hitler.

    Simultaneously a political, social and oral history, this book will quickly become the preeminent short history of Russia's recent past. Photos.

    This collection of popular fiction by the author of The Rhineland Inheritance and Promises to Keep includes Florian's Gate, The Amber Room, and Winter Palace.

    He was there to write a novel, but was seduced away from his work by the world of clubs, bars and restaurants, and the extraordinary architecture. He also fell in love with Dima, a 17-year-old naval cadet.

    Among the seventeen bold and inventive comic writers represented here are the brilliant Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita, Ilf and Petrov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Valentin Katayev, and Yuri Kazakov. "Amusing and excellent reading. The stories in this collection tell the reader more about Soviet life than a dozen sociological or political tracts." - Isaac Bashevis Singer; "An altogether admirable collection . . . by the highly talented translator Mirra Ginsburg . . . Many of these stories and sketches are delicious, even-a miracle!-funny, and full of subtlety and intelligence." - The New Leader; "Hilarious entertainment. Beyond this it illuminates with the cruel light of satire the reality behind the pretentious façade of the Soviet state." - The Sunday Sun (Baltimore).

    In contrast to standard film histories, Yuri Tsivian focuses on reflected images: it features the historical film-goer and early writings on film as well as examining the physical elements of cinematic performance. "Tsivian casts a probing beam of illumination into some of the most obscure areas of film history. And the terrain he lights up with his careful assembly and insightful reading of the records of early film viewing in Russia not only changes our sense of the history of this period but also . . . causes us to re-evaluate some of our most basic theoretical and historical assumptions about what a film is and how it affects its audiences."—Tom Gunning, from the Foreword"Early Cinema in Russia . . . reveals Tsivian's strengths very well and demonstrates why he is . . . the finest film historian of his generation in the former Soviet Union."—Denise Y. Youngblood, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television"A work of fundamental importance."—Julian Graffy, Recent Studies of Russian and Soviet Cinema

    Full of talk, philosophical speculation, and dark humor, The Monkey Link presents a highly original view of the world and of the former Soviet Union. Andrei Bitov wrote the three tales in the novel between 1971 and 1993, while the Soviet Union moved from peace to war to collapse. The first tale was published in Russia in 1976, but the second did not appear - and the third could never have been written - until after glasnost. As time flows through the novel, the changing fortunes of the author, the hero, the censor, and their country generate a very complex set of ironies. On the simplest level, The Monkey Link is a novel in three acts, a comedy of ideas. In the waning years of the Empire, a poet traverses Russia, from the Baltics to the capital, to the shores of the Black Sea. Along the way, he discusses man's place in the scheme of things with, among others, a very sober scientist and a very drunken landscape painter. He is harassed by the authorities, spends time on a movie set, and is an eyewitness to the August 1991 coup. Intricate in its structure but sweeping in its concerns, this exciting novel confirms Bitov's position as one of the most important writers in Russia today.

    Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials, David L. Hoffmann shows how this massive migration to the cities--an influx unprecedented in world history--had major consequences for the nature of the Soviet system and the character of Russian society even today.Hoffmann focuses on events in Moscow between the launching of the industrialization drive in 1929 and the outbreak of war in 1941. He reconstructs the attempts of Party leaders to reshape the social identity and behavior of the millions of newly urbanized workers, who appeared to offer a broad base of support for the socialist regime. The former peasants, however, had brought with them their own forms of cultural expression, social organization, work habits, and attitudes toward authority. Hoffmann demonstrates that Moscow's new inhabitants established social identities and understandings of the world very different from those prescribed by Soviet authorities. Their refusal to conform to the authorities' model of a loyal proletariat thwarted Party efforts to construct a social and political order consistent with Bolshevik ideology. The conservative and coercive policies that Party leaders adopted in response, he argues, contributed to the Soviet Union's emergence as an authoritarian welfare state.

    In The Translator and the Text, Rachel May analyzes Russian literature in English translation, seeing it less as a substitute for the original works than as a subset of English literature, with its own cultural, stylistic, and narrative traditions.

    Since his death, Nikolay Zabolotsky has come to be recognized as a writer of international importance, on a par with Pasternak of Mandelshtam: but compared with them he has been little studied or translated, and until recently aspects of both his life and his work remained mysterious. During the experimental period of Russian art in the 1920s he was a member of the Oberiu movement which this biography documents. In 1938, though uninterested in politics, he was arrested and remained in prison and exile until 1946, after which (with much difficulty) he resumed writing. The whole episode is not only a moving and exemplary human story, but also a notable case study in the effects of Stalin's terror. It makes use of the testimony of family and friends, as well as of material from KGB archives, only recently made available. It also constitutes an introduction to a Zabolotsky's body of poetry. The book contains, as appendices, Zabolotsky's own "The Story of My Imprisonment" and the hitherto secret text of the writer Lesyuchevsky's denunciation of Zabolotsky to the secret police. There is also an anthology of Zabolotsky poems in English translation by Daniel Weissbort and Robin Milner-Gulland and biographical notes on a host of literary figures from the 1920s onwards. The volume is illustrated with a number of early photographs.

    Writing from various points of view, the authors reflect the diverse experiences of Russia's failed 1905 revolution. Condemned by Lenin and rediscoverd by dissidents, this translation has relevance for discussions on contemporary Russia.

    This department was responsible for kidnapping, assassination, sabotage, and guerrilla warfare during World War II, it also set up illegal networks in the United States and Western Europe, and, most crucially, carried out atomic espionage in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Sudoplatov served the KGB for over fifty years, at one point controlling more than twenty thousand guerrillas, moles, and spies. But his involvement with the most nefarious Soviet activities-- and the rulers who ordered them-- made Sudoplatov an unwanted witness, and he was arrested in 1953 after Beria's fall. Despite torture and solitary confinement he refused to "confess", disavowing any criminal actions. He spent fifteen years in prison, then struggled two decades more for rehabilitation. "Special Tasks" is an astonishing memoir and a singular historical document of a man who knew and did too much for the Soviet empire.

    Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions. The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry--Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah--all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov--the most prominent of the towns in the area--witnessed an explosion of intellectual and cultural activity. Focusing on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture, David Fishman here chronicles the remarkable story of these first modern Jews of Russia.

    It reassesses the symbolists' achievements in the light of modern research, focusing on their literary works. Prose is quoted in English translation and poetry is given in the original Russian with prose translations. There is a valuable bibliography of primary sources and an extensive chronological appendix. This book will fill a long-felt gap for students and teachers of Russian and comparative literature, symbolism, modernism, and pre-revolutionary Russian culture.

    Large book on the regalia of the Russian Empire.

    The most thorough trekking guides to these regions.

    Nevertheless, the music has considerable intrinsic value well beyond its curiosity appeal, and includes many pieces unaccountably forgotten and certainly worth reviving, to the ultimate enhancement of our concert repertoire. The study of this music also explains much about the foundations of Soviet culture and its subsequent suppression and decline under the Stalinist yoke. The purpose of this volume is to stimulate interest in this little-known area of Soviet/Russian music. The works charted here constitute a great flowering of avant-garde music which was then savagely dealt with for Stalin's political purposes.

    An analysis of how the dangers posed by the massive levels of pollution and environmental devastation throughout the former Soviet Union can be alleviated through international co-operation.

    In this volume, Kliuchevsky untangles the confused events of the Time of Troubles and the emergence of the Romanov dynasty, and develops his interpretation of the century as prologue to the Petrine reforms. He dramatically underlines the cultural divide between old Russia and the emergent autocracy and the strangely ambivalent relationship between Russia and the West.

    Nadezhda Joffe is the daughter of Adolf Abramovich Joffe, the Bolshevik leader and Left Oppositionist who committed suicide in 1927 to protest the expulsion of Trotsky from the Bolshevik Party. She gives a nightmarish and moving account of her fate and that of countless others at the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Nadezhda Joffe survived and her memoir provides us with the testimony of one who experienced, with a high degree of political consciousness, the most tragic events of this century.