Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the Underground, a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and uncompromising cynicism, and the first major work of existential literature. Among Dostoevsky's prototypical characters is Yemelyan in The Honest Thief, whose tragedy turns on an inability to resist crime. Presented in chronological order, in David Magarshack's celebrated translation, this is the definitive edition of Dostoevsky's best stories.

    Reviewing the work in The New Republic, James Wood wrote that this groundbreaking volume "represents a triumph of translating, editing, and publishing. Beautiful to hold, scholarly and also popularly accessible, it is an enactment of love." Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel has left his mark on a generation of readers and writers. This book will stand as Babel's final, most enduring legacy. Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award; A New York Times Notable Book, a and Library Journal Best Book, a Washington Post Book World Rave, a Village Voice Favorite Book of the Year.

    Her canvas is monumental -- the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand -- but her focus is heartrendingly intimate. One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and resourcefulness of twenty-two-year-old Anna. Though she dreams of an artist's life, she must instead forage for food in the ever more desperate city and watch her little brother grow cruelly thin. Their father, a blacklisted writer who once advocated a robust life of the mind, withers in spirit and body. At such brutal times everything is tested. And yet Dunmore's inspiring story shows that even then, the triumph of the human heart is that love need not fall away.

    She won international fame for her reporting on the Chechen wars and, more generally, on Russian state corruption. Nothing but the Truth is a defining collection of Anna Politkovskaya's best writing for Novaya gazeta, published between 1999 and 2006.Beginning with a brief introduction by the author about her pariah status, Nothing but the Truth demonstrates the great breadth of her reportage, from the Chechen wars to domestic Russian affairs, the Moscow theatre hostage-taking in which she became involved, the Beslan school siege, and pieces about politicians, oligarchs and ordinary citizens. Elsewhere are illuminating accounts of interviews and encounters with western leaders including Lionel Jospin, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, and exiled figures including Boris Berezovsky, Akhmed Zakaev, and Vladimir Bukovsky. Her non-political writing is also represented here, revealing her delightful personality, as are international reactions to her murder.Nothing but the Truth will also stand as a tribute to Anna Politkovskaya's matter-of-fact personal courage, disclosing information glossed over or omitted completely about the dangers she faced and the threats she received in the course of her work. It is a lasting and inspiring book from one of the great reporters of our age.

    With her help he becomes the Tzar's best huntsman, only to be sent on impossible tasks by the jealous Tzar. Will the Golden Mare be able to help him win Yelena the Fair?

    

    Born in splendor difficult to imagine today, she endured a lifetime of relentless tragedy with courage and exceptional powers of adjustment.The Last Grand Duchess is a valuable account of the final decades of the house of Romanov as seen through the eyes of its last surviving member. Through Olga, we meet Queen Victoria, George V of England, Rasputin, Mrs. Anderson - on whose story the movie Anastasia was made - and other impostors who plagued the exiled duchess with false hope.In this official memoir, Ian Vorres captures the loneliness and violence of Olga's years in Russia, her loveless first marriage to Prince Peter of Oldenburg, her years of exile in England and Denmark, and her final settlement with her second husband and family in Canada.Long out of print, and now reissued in a handsomely illustrated edition, The Last Grand Duchess is the thorough and engaging official biography of an extraordinary woman.

    He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention.In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

    "Hermit and Six Toes"; "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream"; "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII"; and "Tai Shou Chuan USSR" are four characterstic stories by the young Russian virtuoso Victor Pelevin, here collected in a New Directions Bibelot edition. With a deadpan and cooly ironic voice that speaks of the phantasmagorical, the surreal, the grotesque and the absurd just as affectingly as Gogol did in his day, Victor Pelevin writes of the dark chaos of the New Russia. In one story, a public toilet attendant discovers in her tiled hovel the entranceway to an alternate reality; in another, a man walks through a city at night with a companion he isn't entirely sure isn't his own shadow. This slim volume offers first-time Pelevin readers a compelling taste of his bleakly comic genius.

    He began the first book at the age of twenty, in 1926. The last was finished in 1940.A writer who had his roots deep among the people, Sholokhov was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, a well-known public figure and a member of the Academy of Sciences.His books have been translated into 58 languages. And Quiet Flows the Don has gone through over 170 editions in the USSR amounting to more than eight and a half million copies. Mikhail (Aleksandrovich) Sholokhov (1905-1984) was a Russian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Sholokhov's best-known work is the novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1926-40). While Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1863-69) immortalized the Napoleonic campaigns to the eve of the Decembrist revolt, And Quiet Flows the Don showed the destruction of the Cossacks and the birth of a new society.

    Using records and archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.

    An instructional section explains many aspects of the Old Rite piety, including fasting, the sign of the Cross, bows, preparation for Holy Communion, the use of the prayer rope (Lestovka), and many others. A large selection of Troparia, Kontakia, morning and evening prayers, Akathists, Canons, daily hours, and more. New to the second edition is the section containing Troparia and Kontakia of the Eight Tones, the Triodions, and the major Feasts and Saints celebrated throughout the year.From the Preface:The sources from which our Slavonic text was drawn, and from which the English translation was made, are liturgical and devotional books carefully cherished and used for centuries by the Russian Orthodox Old Ritualists, commonly called Old Believers. These books are part of the whole Orthodox tradition; they are none other than the very books printed and used by the whole Orthodox Church in Russia before the reforms of Patriarch Nicon in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the Russian Orthodox Church now accepts these books as being vehicles of salvation equal to the more modern editions. Thus the Orthodox reader will find in this prayer book material with which he is, in general, familiar, but with some small variations. (page vi)

    This is not a depressing book but an inspiriting and encouraging one." --Doris Lessing"The sixteen life stories are riveting.... testimony to the complexity of the human spirit[, ] to miracles of survival and endurance in the most hellish of conditions.... Till My Tale Is Told remind[s] us of the importance of remembrance and testimony about this particularly brutal chapter of human history."--The Women's Review of BooksArrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial and sentencing, transport, labor camps, internal exile, sometimes release, often followed by re-arrest and re-imprisonment and, for those who outlived Stalin, eventual reprieve and rehabilitation these are the outlines of the experiences recorded by 16 courageous Russian women whose moving testimonies, most of them written in secret and at great personal risk, are presented here.

    Her fabulous private horde of jewels, miniatures, clocks, porcelain, arms and armor, coins and medals, paintings, and other precious objects is owned by the Hermitage Museum, which is housed in the former Winter Palace of the tsars in St. Petersburg. These are treasures fit for an empress; no one can even attempt to acquire their equal today.This rich volume -- published to coincide with the opening of the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, London, the museum's first permanent exhibition space outside Russia -- presents the finest and most precious pieces from Catherine's collection in glorious full color. Among the rare objects included here, many of which have never before been reproduced, are a miniature of her lover Grigori Orlov painted on ivory; figures from a porcelain service given to Catherine by Frederick the Great of Prussia; Catherine's wig, made entirely of silver thread; filigree gold hairpins sent to her by the emperor of China; and much, much more. Expert texts set the works in context.

    Here he discusses the character of creative writing, the attitude of the artist to his environment, and the transmutation of the artist's experience into a work of art. He offers, as well, brilliant studies of Pushkin, Gogol, Belinsky, Lermontov, and Krylov, and a penetrating account of his own difficulties in writing Fathers and Sons. There are also descriptions of travels through Italy, simply and beautifully written pieces on country life, and eyewitness accounts of the 1848 political riots in Paris. David Magarshack has provided a first-class translation and has written an introduction which explains and sets the scene for each of the essays. "The best possible introduction to the author a reader could ask for....Turgenev is an uninsistent, lyric meditator, who sees with a precise eye wherever he looks, and whether he is drawing a bead on a quail or escaping from a burning ship, always asks the uncomfortable questions of himself." New York Herald-Tribune."

    The Life, Counsels, and Miracles of Eldress Rachel, Visionary of Russia.

    Provocative yet iconoclastic, his work transcends the conventions of male nude photography, confronting the viewer/voyeur with a raw style and new sensibility. A cross between porn and fashion, pop culture and marginal kink, Lost Boys is a poetic and sometimes raunchy journey into different obsessions and fetishes of the cosmopolitan urban youth culture. Crimean rasta boys, Russian wrestlers and military cadets, German skinheads, and football hooligans are among the subjects of these incendiary but intimate portraits.

    Paperback book, four audio CDs, and 1 MP3 CD

    

    Challenging romantic views of the Jewish family in the shtetl, she shows that divorce rates among Russian Jews in the first half of the century were astronomical compared to the non-Jewish population. Even more surprising is her conclusion that these divorce rates tended to drop later in the century, in contrast to the rising pattern among populations undergoing modernization. Freeze also studies the growing involvement of the Tsarist state. This occurred partly at the behest of Jewish women contesting patriarchy and parental power and partly because the government felt that Jewish families were in complete anarchy and in need of order and regulation. Extensive research in newly-declassified collections from twelve archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania enables Freeze to reconstruct Jewish patterns of marriage and divorce and to analyze the often conflicting interests of Jewish husbands and wives, rabbinic authorities, and the Russian state. Balancing archival resources with memoirs and printed sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, she offers a tantalizing glimpse of the desires and travails of Jewish spouses, showing how individual life histories reflect the impact of modernization on Jewish matchmaking, gender relations, the "emancipation" of Jewish women, and the incursion of the Tsarist state into the lives of ordinary Jews.

    Rev. Zugger tells of the faithful men and women shackled by dictatorship, doomed to deportation, and abandoned by their own church in the west.Soviet Russia was an empire born of atheism with religion viewed as a threat to the state's notion of individualism. By 1932, dictator Joseph Stalin firmly declared that religion would be extinct in the USSR within five years. In this compelling volume, Zugger details the Soviet campaign against Catholicism among many ethnic groups and worshippers whose devotion would not be shaken. He shows how they kept faith alive in prison camps, in remote villages, in monastery prisons, and in the secrecy of their homes, where the light of faith continued to burn brightly while churches crumbled or became dance halls and office buildings. This is the first book in English to recount the fate of Catholic Russia and the church in the various lands conquered by Soviet rule. It is at once a memorial to those who perished, a tribute to those who survived, and a testament to the enduring power of faith.

    Bushkovitch demonstrates that the interaction of the tsar and the ruling elite was at the core of Russian politics as Peter managed to largely master the contentious elite by a series of compromises, ultimately toward one that favored new men without excluding the aristocrats entirely. The outcome was a new balance of power at the center, and a new Europeanized culture.

    It analyzes major recent developments, including the Duma election of 1999, the Presidential election of 2000, and the institutional changes launched by President Putin. It covers institutional design, elections, parties, federalism, regional politics, presidency and legislature, economic reform and economic interests, foreign policy, public opinion, the mass media, and prospects for democracy. Including many specially commissioned contributions from more than forty of the world's leading specialists on Russian politics--a third of them Russians--makes this the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to political institutions and processes in Putin's Russia. Remaining accessible to a wide readership, it also breaks new ground on Russian politics.

    The defendants were falsely charged with treason and espionage because of their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and because of their heartfelt response as Jews to Nazi atrocities on occupied Soviet territory. Stalin had created the committe to rally support for the Soviet Union during World War II, but he then disbanded it after the war as his paranoia mounted about Soviet Jews. For many years, a host of myths surrounded the case against the committee. Now this book, which presents an abridged version of the long-suppressed transcript of the trial, reveals the Kremilin's machinery of destruction. Joshua Rubenstein provides annotations about the players and events surrounding the case. In a long introduction, drawing on newly released documents in Moscow archives and on interviews with relatives of the defendants in Israel, Russia, and the United States, Rubenstein also sets the trial in historical and political context and offers a vivid account o

    Using this framework, and drawing on field research in Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus, he provides an in-depth look at the link between national identity and the economic policies of the new states formed by the breakup of the Soviet Union.All these states, from the Baltic coast to central Asia, were economically dependent on Russia during the 1990s. However, they reacted very differently to that dependence, and their reactions can be traced, Abdelal contends, to their individual societies. Some, such as Belarus, found dependence inevitable and sought economic reintegration with Russia. Others, like Lithuania, interpreted dependence as a large-scale security threat and reoriented their economies away from Russia. A third group, typified by Ukraine, demonstrated no coherent economic policy at all regarding dependence.Abdelal distinguishes the Nationalist tradition in international political economy from the Realist tradition, and shows that economic nationalism is different than mercantilism. He demonstrates the ways that national identity affects economic policy and explains why some governments seek economic autonomy while others prefer regional reintegration. He then applies his approach to other cases of economic reorganization after the end of empire--eastern Europe in the 1920s after the Habsburgs, 1950s Indonesia, and French West Africa in the 1960s.

    Its essays examine how ideals of manliness intersected with historical developments, the formation of national identities, and changing definitions of intimacy. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of gender theory and Russian theory alike.

    Werth considers these large questions in his survey of imperial Russian rule in the vast Volga-Kama region. First conquered in the sixteenth century, the Volga-Kama lands were by the nineteenth century both part of the Russian heartland and resolutely "other" the home of a mix of Slavic, Finnic, and Turkic peoples where the urge to assimilate was always counterbalanced by determined efforts to preserve cultural and religious differences. The Volga-Kama thus poses the dilemmas of empire in especially complex and telling ways. Drawing on a wide range of printed and archival sources, Werth untangles and reconstructs this complicated history, focusing on the ways in which the tsarist state and Orthodox missions used conversion in their ongoing (and regularly frustrated) efforts to transform the region's Muslim and animist populations into imperial, Orthodox citizens. He shows that the regime became less concerned with religion and more concerned with secular attributes as the marker of cultural differences, an emphasis that would change dramatically in the early years of Soviet rule."

    An absorbing and original exercise in history of the book, it is also a major contribution to the understanding of Russia's relationship with the West, and of the cultural world inhabited by the Russian intelligentsia.

    Both Russian and Ukrainian writers have explored the politics of identity in the post-Soviet period, but while the canon of Russian imperial thought is well known, the tradition of resistance B which in the Ukrainian case can be traced as far back as the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian polities and cultures of the seventeenth century B is much less familiar. Shkandrij demonstrates that Ukrainian literature has been marginalized in the interests of converting readers to imperial and assimilatory designs by emphasizing narratives of reunion and brotherhood and denying alterity.