Combining scientific realism with a poetic vision and elements of folk tale, this text of ten stories presents the dreams of the builders of socialism.

    Pearce sets out to challenge this typical media typecasting: Solzhenitsyn as "paradox personified: the pessimistic optimist." He shows how Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith brought him to the truth that shines so clearly in all his writing: that "creeping knowledge that human history may be little more than a long defeat in a land of exile. Yet such a defeat, however long, is rooted in time: temporal and therefore temporary." Among the features of this major new biography are exclusive personal interviews with Solzhenitsyn, previously unpublished poetry, a rare photo gallery, and a focus on the rich faith dimension of this Nobel Prize winner's life. Any new student of Solzhenitsyn should start with this book.

    "His stories, which deluge us with feeling, make feeling more intelligent; more magnanimous. He is an artist of our moral maturity." This volume presents forty-two of Chekhov's later short stories, written between 1888 and 1903, in acclaimed translations by Constance Garnett and chosen by Shelby Foote. Among the most outstanding are "A Dreary Story," a dispassionate tale that reflects Chekhov's doubts about his role as an artist. Thomas Mann deemed it "a truly extraordinary, fascinating story . . . unlike anything else in world literature." "The Darling," a delightful work highly admired by Tolstoy, offers comic proof that life has no meaning without love. And in "The Lady with the Dog," which Vladimir Nabokov called "one of the greatest stories ever written," a chance affair takes possession of a bored young woman and a cynical roué, changing their lives forever. Also included in this collection are the famous trilogy, "The Man in a Case," "Gooseberries," and "About Love," as well as "Sleepy," "The Horse-Stealers," and "Betrothed." "The greatest of Chekhov's stories are, no matter how many times reread, always an experience that strikes deep into the soul and produces an alteration there," wrote William Maxwell. "As for those masterpieces 'The Lady with the Dog,' 'The Horse-Stealers,' 'Sleepy,' 'Gooseberries,' 'About Love'—where else do you see so clearly the difference between light and dark, or how dark darkness can be?" Shelby Foote has provided an Introduction for this edition.

    She was betrothed to Tsarevitch Nicholas of Russia, a love match on both sides, but tragically he died months before the wedding. A year later, out of duty she married his brother the new Tsarevich and sailed for Russia in 1866.

    His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the Soviet Union and his achievements as a Nobel Prize winner and America’s poet laureate.In this penetrating biography, Brodsky’s life and work are illuminated by his great friend, the late poet and literary scholar Lev Loseff. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, some previously unpublished, and extensive interviews with writers and critics, Loseff carefully reconstructs Brodsky’s personal history while offering deft and sensitive commentary on the philosophical, religious, and mythological sources that influenced the poet’s work. Published to great acclaim in Russia and now available in English for the first time, this is literary biography of the first order, and sets the groundwork for any books on Brodsky that might follow.

    However, Robert Klose, who is single, wanted a son so badly that he faced down the opposition and overcame seemingly insurmountable barriers to realize his goal. The story of his quest for a son is detailed in this intimate personal account.The frustrating truth he reports is that most adoption agencies seem unsure of how to respond to a single man's application. During the three years that it took for him to proceed through the adoption maze, Klose met resistance and dead ends at every attempt. Happenstance finally led him to Russia, where he found the child of his dreams in a Moscow orphanage, a Russian boy named Alyosha.This is the first book to be written by a single man adopting from abroad. The narrative of his quest serves as an instructional firsthand manual for single men wishing to adopt. It details the prospective father's heightening sense of anticipation as he untangles bureaucratic snarls and addresses cultural differences involved in adopting a foreign child.When he arrives in Russia, he supposes the adoption will be a matter of following cut-and-dried procedures. Instead, his difficulties are only beginning. Although he meets kind and generous Russians, his encounter with the child welfare system in Moscow turns out to be both chaotic and bizarre. However, his dogged ordeal pays off more bountifully than he ever could have hoped. In the end he comes face to face with a little boy who changes his life forever.

    This is the first complete edition of their letters and telegrams, plus English translations of the few telegrams in Russian. We see in these pages the enormous love the couple shared against the backdrop of a bloody war and the approaching end of the Russian empire. Alexandra offers extensive commentary on hospitals and the wounded (she was a volunteer nurse). Nicholas II reports on the military and the war effort. The growing influence of Rasputin is also thoroughly documented in these texts. The reader sees in detail the crises that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the tsarist regime. Important for all students of late Imperial Russia and World War I, and essential for those interested in the Romanovs.

    

    The author•Highlights the political uses of culture—the ways in which language, history, and identity can be manipulated by political elites •Examines why some attempts to mold identity succeed where others fail •Reveals why, in the case of Moldova, a project of identity construction succeeded in creating a state but failed to make an independent nation

    The author introduces each source in this volume fully and provides commentary and analysis.Using eye-witness accounts, official documents and new materials which have just come to light, Richard Sakwa gives an historical overview of the Soviet Union from the revolution of 1906 to the fall of the regime.

    An autobiography of George Cohon, senior chairman of McDonald's in Russia and Canada, and one of the most successful and colorful businessmen of his generation.

    That he did so with genuine appreciation and Fondness, and with the methodical diligence of an accountant, is evident in his record -- having carefully numbered the more than 300 pieces (some of which were one-of-a-kind creations by Faberge or Cartier), he painted a miniature watercolor of each item. This exquisite album, re-discovered in the archives of the Kremlin Museums in Moscow, is reproduced here as a facsimile for the first time, and accompanied by unpublished private photos of the Russian Imperial Family. As Alexander yon Solodkoff notes in his introduction, these photographs "as opposed to the large quantity of stiff official portraits...show the personality and the private life of the Tsar and those who were close to him."

    Drawing upon a wealth of untapped resources from Russian, British, and American archives, including unpublished diaries of many of the principal characters and never-before-published photographs, Perry and Pleshakov render an indelible portrait of a family and their time, from the youth of Alexander III in the 1860s to the death, one hundred years later, of his daughter Olga Alexandrovna, the last Grand Duchess.Set against the backdrop of this most cataclysmic century, The Flight of the Romanovs is a must-read for anyone interested in this fascinating dynasty, Russian history, and the history of European royalty.

    It comprises paintings, sculpture and drawings by every significant artist of the period, as well as works by early Salon artists who were highly regarded in their day but are now less well known. All the paintings for which the Hermitage is justly proud, whether by Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso or Matisse, are featured, but so too are many that are kept in storage at the museum. Includes an illuminating commentary by Dr Albert Kostenevich, curator of Modern European Art at the Hermitage Museum.

    After studying law and attending the Academy of Art, Roerich developed a passionate interest in archaeology, his contribution to which was acknowledged when he became a lecturer at the Russian Archaeological Society in 1900. His extensive travels in Europe, Russia, Asia, and especially India were a source of inspiration wholly original and unique. The prolific creator of over 7000 paintings, Roerich belonged to the great creative art movement which took place in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution. Besides his enormous artistic talent, Roerich was the author of the Pact which bears his name and which was designed to protect the cultural heritage in time of war. After living a very full life, he died in the Kulu valley in India in 1947. Recognized in 1923, there is a museum in New York devoted to him. He wrote numerous books and collections of poetry, and contributed to artistic and archaeological journals. Roerich, with his huge and versatile talent, is one of the most interesting creative minds of the early 20th century. Some fine examples of his art are to be found in "La Balance" and "Loukomori" in the 1905 work of M. Maeterlinck, in stage sets for Rimsky Korsakov's Snegurochka, Paris 1909, and in sets and costumes for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, 1910-1921.

    

    The specific focus is the Terek Cossacks, frontier settlers along the Terek river who became servants of the Russian state, warriors, and occasionally soldiers for (and deserters from) the Russian imperial armies. Barrett reconsiders Cossack history with an eye for its relation to the policies and reality of pre-Soviet Russian imperialism. The rich historiography of the American frontier informs this re-evaluation—the Cossack interaction with native peoples and the formation of a unique frontier society closely mirror the contemporary borderland settlements in the American West. But Barrett presents Russian colonization as a fluid mixing of cultures rather than a cut-and dried military conquest, as it has previously been presented in ideology-laden histories of the Soviet Union. This opens up new ways in which to consider the myths and perceptions of historic Russian nationalism and its relation to state formation and ethnic identity in the Caucasus and post-Soviet Russia today.

    The Spectre, modernity's belief in salvation by revolutionary ideology, haunts them. Alice's looking glass greets us at this turn and that. Throughout, Martin Malia's inspired use of these devices aptly conveys the surreality of the whole Soviet Russian phenomenon and the West's unbalanced perception of it. He shows us the usually distorted images and stereotypes that have dominated Western ideas about Russia since the eighteenth century. And once these emerge as projections of the West's own internal anxieties, he shifts his focus to the institutional structures and cultural forms Russia shares with her neighbors.Here modern Europe is depicted as an East-West cultural gradient in which the central and eastern portions respond to the Atlantic West's challenge in delayed and generally skewed fashion. Thus Russia, after two centuries of building then painfully liberalizing its Old Regime, in 1917 tried to leap to a socialism that would be more advanced and democratic than European capitalism. The result was a cruel caricature of European civilization, which mesmerized and polarized the West for most of this century. As the old East-West gradient reappears in genuinely modern guise, this brilliantly imaginative work shows us the reality that has for so long tantalized--and eluded--Western eyes.

    He offers his account of governing in the early 1990s, up to Yeltsin's cliffhanger re-election in 1996.

    

    The book is illustrated with more than 310 photographs and more than 250 line drawings. This book represents THE reference source for Soviet/Russian armored fighting vehicles and artillery. No other book comes close to offering this detailed level of information on the path and design and all programs relating to tanks, APCs, artillery, and other AFVs beginning with the post-war programs.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    It takes some of the central issues of the critical debate to develop a conception of postmodern poetics as a dialogue with chaos and places Russian literature in the context of an enriched postmodernism.

    Through careful ethnographic work on two collective farms operated in Buryat communities in Siberia, the author presented an absorbing--if dispiriting--account of the actual functioning of a planned economy at the local level.Now this classic work is back in print in a revised edition that adds new material from the author's most recent research in the former Soviet Union. In two new chapters she documents what has happened to the two farms in the collapsing Russian economy. She finds that collective farms are still the dominant agricultural forms, not out of nostalgic sentiment or loyalty to the Soviet ideal, but from economic and political necessity.Today the collectives are based on households and small groups coming together out of choice. There have been important resurgences in "traditional" thinking about kinship, genealogy, shamanism and mountain cults; and yet all of this is newly formed by its attempt to deal with post-Soviet realities.Marx Went Away will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology."The book should be on the shelf of every student of Soviet affairs." --Times Literary SupplementCaroline Humphrey is Fellow of King's College and Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

    But this was not enough. Seeking to control human thought as well, Soviet authorities provided official words and images to legitimize the gulag, distort its moral nature, and even glorify its "necessary" violence. This fascinating book is the first in English to examine official Soviet concentration camp literature from the early 1920s through the mid-1960s. Dariusz Tolczyk probes the evolution of this literature, the totalitarian thinking that inspired it, and the scandalous role played by Russian literary intellectuals who collaborated in its creation.The author considers how Soviet novelists and poets in the 1920s dealt with the Leninist notion that ethics is entirely utilitarian and relative; analyzes the official glorification of the gulag in the early 1930s in such works as White Sea Canal, a composite volume by 36 famous authors praising the use of slave labor; and examines why the subject of the camps became taboo from 1937 to the Khrushchevian thaw of the early 1960s. Tolczyk also provides a masterful account of the problem posed for Soviet censors by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and shows how the failure of the Soviet regime to come to terms with the ethical legacy of the gulag signaled the decline of the totalitarian project.

    A prominent Soviet Air Force pilot and son of a longtime Politburo member provides an extraordinary personal chronicle of his flying career.

    Although each novel illuminates the other, they also stand alone as original and independent works of art. In The Silk, the Shears, Vrkljan traces the symbolic and moral significance of her life, and her vision of the fate of women in her mother's time and in her own. Marina continues the intense analysis of the poetic self, using the life of Marina Tsvetaeva to meditate on the processes behind biography.

    C.S. Walton met Ivan Petrov in a city in the West in 1996. Over the course of two years he told Walton his life story. It is the story of a man who, in the face of complete social collapse, chose to be a wandering drunk.

    Chekhov, whose passion for his two warring muses, comedy and tragedy, is nowhere more evident than in his first three-full length plays, Platanov, Ivanov, and The Wood Demon. These works are assembled in this third volume of the complete plays of Anton Chekhov, newly translated by Carol Rocamora and published in honor of Chekhov's centennial. Platonov, Chekhov's earliest, rarely translated play is adapted by Rocamora from its original, six-hour long, unfinished state into a playable comedy about a Russian Don Juan who copes with his boredom and ennui by victimizing every woman in the district. Ivanov, Chekhov's incarnation of the Russian Hamlet, is a marvel of a character study which has challenged actors from John Gielgud to Ralph Fiennes to Kevin Kline. And finally, The Wood Demon, Chekhov's earlier, comedic version of his masterpiece, Uncle Vanya. Actors, directors and lovers of Chekhov's plays will delight in discovering many of the settings, characters, and themes that later appear in his four major works. Theatres will find three exciting full-length plays infrequently performed in the United States which merit renewed attention.

    It concerns the lives of those who suffered under Communism -- subjected to sudden arrests, interrogation, beatings, and unimaginable torture. Those who courageously maintained the dignity of faith and hope in God serve as a model of endurance and perseverance. Those who failed teach us what shortcomings we must overcome if we want our faith in God to be real. This book contains the most recent declassified information from KGB, NKVD, and other secret government files. It is the first in a projected series.

    He is a Doukhobor, a 'spirit-wrestler', a member of a group of radical Russian sectarians. He is pointing to a village beyond the southern steppe, at the far south of the old Russian empire: 'I was born here, ' he says. 'On the edge of the world.' So begins Philip Marsden's Russian journey - perhaps the most penetrating account of Russian life since the Soviet Union's collapse made travel possible again. In villages unseen by outsiders since before the revolution, he encounters men and women of fabulous courage, larger than life, dazed by the century's turbulence. By turns wise, devout, comic, they seem to have stepped straight from the pages of Turgenev, Gogol and Babel. Marsden meets such figures as the Yezidi Sheikh of Sheikhs, an exiled Georgian prince and a cast of passionate scholars, stooping survivors of the gulags, strutting Cossacks and extreme, isolated sects of Milk-Drinkers and Spirit-Wrestlers. The Spirit-Wrestlers peels away the grey facade of post-Soviet Russia.

    It challenges both the Russian cult of the Great Patriotic Struggle and the distorted Western version created during the Cold War, arguing that the clash was caused by the struggle for the mastery of Europe.

    This thought-provoking volume includes more than 200 photographs, all, says author Leah Bendavid-Val, "generated by governments for causes that were shared by the photographers who took the pictures, the authorities who funded them, and the publishers who disseminated them." These photographs all offer impactive realism, but it is "mingled [with] romance...in varying ways and degrees."

    This title reveals the thoughts of Boris Slutsky as he enthused during the dynamism and terror of the 1930s, fought heroically during the Second World War, and then became an increasingly sceptical witness to the de-stalinisations and re-stalinisations that preceded the terminal senility of the Soviet system under Brezhnev.

    By "working the rough stone" of their inner thoughts and feelings, such men sought to become champions of moral enlightenment and to create a vision of social action that could bring about change without challenging the social and political precepts on which Russia's stability depended.By challenging a number of long-held notions about Russian society, Smith broadens our understanding of the complex history of eighteenth-century Russia. Engagingly written and richly illustrated with rare engravings of Masonic life and ritual, this volume will appeal to readers interested in Russia, Europe, the Enlightenment, and the history of Freemasonry.