Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.http://press.princeton.edu/titles/897...

    Petersburg-a "window on the West"-and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself-its character, spiritual essence, and destiny. He skillfully interweaves the great works-by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall-with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world. Figes's characters range high and low: the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the Kingdom of God, as well as the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner's wife. Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the spirit of "Russianness" is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory-a powerful force that unified a vast country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state.

    Babel was best known for his mastery of the short story form—in which he ranks alongside Kafka and Hemingway—but his career was tragically cut short when he was murdered by Stalin's secret police. Edited by his daughter Nathalie Babel and translated by award-winner Peter Constantine, this paperback edition includes the stunning Red Cavalry Stories; The Odessa Tales, featuring the legendary gangster Benya Krik; and the tragic later stories, including "Guy de Maupassant." This will be the standard edition of Babel's stories for years to come.

    The recent murder of Anna Politkovskaya is grim evidence of the danger faced by journalists passionately committed to writing the truth about wars and politics.  A longtime critic of the Russian government, particularly with regard to its policies in Chechnya, Politkovskaya was a special correspondent for the liberal Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta.  Beginning in 1999, Politkovskaya authored numerous articles about the war in Chechnya, and she was the only journalist to have constant access to the region.Politkovskaya's second book on the Chechen War,  A Small Corner of Hell, offers an insider's view of this ongoing conflict.  In this book, Politkovskaya focuses her attention on those caught in the crossfire.  She recounts the everyday horrors of living in the midst of war, examines how the Chechen war has damaged Russian society, and takes a hard look at the ways people on both sides profited from it.  Now available in paperback,  A Small Corner of Hell ensures that Politkovskaya's words will not be erased.         "[A Small Corner of Hell] skips harrowingly from year to year and place to place.  The arch-villains are the Russian death squads, venal and brutal, and the complacent, lying politicians and generals who profit from the illegal trade in booty, oil, and captives.  Her heroes are not the Chechen resistance—a gangsterish and ill-fed lot—but the long-suffering civilian population, whose natural grit and solidarity has gradually dissolved under the relentless brutality of daily life."—Economist         "A personal, unblinking stare at the casualties of war."—Jonathan Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

    Russia’s prized submarine, the Kursk, began her fatal plunge to the ocean floor. Award-winning journalist Robert Moore presents a riveting, brilliantly researched account of the deadliest submarine disaster in history. Journey down into the heart of the Kursk to witness the last hours of the twenty-three young men who survived the initial blasts. Visit the highly restricted Arctic submarine base to which Moore obtained secret admission, where the families of the crew clamored for news of their loved ones. Drawing on exclusive access to top Russian military figures, Moore tells the inside story of the Kursk disaster with factual depth and the compelling moment-by-moment tension of a thriller.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Focusing on six of these ruthless men Hoffman reveals how a few players managed to take over Russia's cash-strapped economy and then divvy it up in loans-for-shares deals. Before perestroika, these men were normal Soviet citizens, stuck in a dead-end system, claustrophobic apartments, and long bread lines. But as Communism loosened, they found gaps in the economy and reaped huge fortunes by getting their hands on fast money. They were entrepreneurs. As the government weakened and their businesses flourished, they grew greedier. Now the stakes were higher. The state was auctioning off its own assets to the highest bidder. The tycoons go on wild borrowing sprees, taking billions of dollars from gullible western lenders. Meanwhile, Russia is building up a debt bomb. When the ruble finally collapses and Russia defaults, the tycoons try to save themselves by hiding their assets and running for cover. They turn against each other as each one faces a stark choice--annihilate or be annihilated. The story of the old Russia was spies, dissidents, and missiles. This is the new Russia, where civil society and the rule of law have little or no meaning.

    Luke is one of the most intriguing saints who suffered under the Soviets. Outspoken regarding his faith, he was exiled and tortured multiple times. Yet the authorities could not deny his exceptional medical skills: he was appointed as a chief surgeon overseeing the treatment of injured soldiers during WWII and received the Stalin award for his pioneering surgical work. This book is the first presentation of his life in English. It documents his personal struggles, self-sacrifice and love for patients, miracles, and bold spiritual guidance during the Church's most difficult period in Russia.

    6-page laminated guide includes: alphabet numbers months & days capitalization & gender word order nouns & their declensions pronouns prepositions adjectives adverbs verbs and much more...

    Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges. In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    In 1993 they decided that their conversations might be of interest to others and so they began to tape-record them. From reminiscences of their starry-eyed university days to reflections on the use of force to "save socialism" to contemplation of the end of the cold war, here is a far more candid picture of Gorbachev than we have ever seen before.

    In addition, they supply a unique eyewitness account of a dramatic period in Russian history, told by a gifted and outspoken poet.

    Equal parts travel memoir and cookbook, Catherine Jones’s critically acclaimed and award-winning book, A Year of Russian Feasts, combines her warm, insightful writing style with her sensitive approach to discovering her family’s Russian cultural heritage and its cuisine.

    But what of the grimy toilet in the communal apartment or the forlorn ruins left after the Second World War?This book explores the representation, meanings and uses of space in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1947 and 1991. The essays ñ written from different disciplinary perspectives ñ investigate the extent to which actual spaces conformed to the dominant political order in the region. Should, for instance, the creation of private spaces, such as the Russian dacha and the Czech chata, be understood as acts of appropriation in which lives were fashioned against the collective or, alternatively, as 'gifts' given by the State in return for quiescence? Whilst monuments and public spaces were designed to relay official ideology, one of the most notable features of the events that marked the end of the Bloc was the way that they became sites of dissent. Examining the myriad ways in which space was used and conceived within socialist society, this book makes an essential contribution to Eastern European and Soviet Studies and provides significant new angles on the factors that underpinned socialism's eventual downfall.

    This unique study provides insight into the last six decades of tsarist Russia through the experiences of the odd ball member of the clan. An historian and a biologist, the Grand Duke made major contributions in both these fields. A political liberal, he fought tirelessly for reform from within the system. His reformist views made him a pariah within his own family, and contemporary recognition of his accomplishments came more from abroad than at home.Entering the military, as all Romanovs did, the Grand Duke eventually became hostile toward it and was in fact the only family member ever to formally leave military service. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Berlin and Moscow and even won election to the French Academy--one of only two Russians to do so. As the political situation in Russia worsened, he urged the tsar to implement reforms, and he even participated in discussions of a palace coup. Exiled to Vologda after the Communist seizure of power, he was later imprisoned by the police and shot in January 1919.

    Essays highlight such collectors as Catherine the Great, members of the Russian nobility such as the Yusupovs and the Golitsyns, and the early twentieth-century merchant-patrons Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The book's authors relate how works from these distinguished collections were united at the Pushkin Museum to form one of the most impressive arrays of French paintings outside of France. The book reproduces and discusses seventy-six of the museum's most important holdings, including masterpieces by Nicolas Poussin, Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Camille Corot, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, some of which are also landmark works in the history of art.

    These beautiful, inspiring gift books are sure to help you focus on those things that truly matter, things like friendship, wisdom, happiness and, of course, love.Friendship brings out the best in us...365 quotes and thoughts about what makes friends so special.

    He kept detailed journals of his adventures, which today form a small part of his voluminous archive in the Library of Congress. Frith Maier has combined the diaries with selected letters and Kennan's published articles on the Caucasus to create a vivid narrative of his six-month odyssey.The journals have been organized into three parts. The first covers Kennan's journey to the Caucasus, a significant feat in itself. The second chronicles his expedition across the main Caucasus Ridge with the Georgian nobleman Prince Jorjadze. In the final part, Kennan circles back through the lands of Chechnya to slip once again into the Dagestan highlands.Kennan's remarkable curiosity and perception come through in this lively and accessible narrative, as does his humor at the challenges of his travels.In her introduction, Maier discusses Kennan's illustrious career and his reliability as an observer, while providing background on the Caucasus to help clarify Kennan's descriptions of daily life, religion, etiquette, customary law, and local government. In an Afterword, she retraces Kennan's steps to find descendants of Prince Jorjadze and describes her work in coproducing, with filmmaker Christopher Allingham, a documentary inspired by Kennan's Caucasus journey.

    In Trains of Thought Victor Brombert recaptures the story of his youth in a Proustian reverie, recalling, with a rare combination of humor and tenderness, his childhood in France, his family's escape to America during the Vichy regime, his experiences in the U.S. Army from the invasion of Normandy to the occupation of Berlin, and his discovery of his scholarly vocation. In shimmering prose, Brombert evokes his upbringing in Paris's upper-middle-class 16th arrondissement, a world where "the sweetness of things" masked the class tensions and political troubles that threatened the stability of the French democracy. Using the train as a metaphor to describe his personal journey, Brombert recalls his boyhood enchantment with railway travel—even imagining that he had been conceived on a sleeper. But the young Brombert sensed that "the poetry of the railroad also had its darker side, for there was the turmoil of departures, the terror . . . of being pursued by a gigantic locomotive, the nightmare of derailments, or of being trapped in a tunnel." With time, Brombert became acutely aware of the grimmer aspects of life around him—the death of his sister, Nora, on an operating table, the tragic disappearance of his boyhood love, Dany, with her infant child, and the mounting cries of "Sale Juif," or "dirty Jew," that grew from a whisper into a thundering din as the decade drew to a close. The invasion of May 1940 dispelled the optimistic belief, shared by most of the French nation, that the horrors that had descended on Germany could never happen to them. The family was forced to flee from Paris, first to Nice, then to Spain, and finally across the Atlantic on a banana freighter to America. Discovering the excitement of New York, Brombert nonetheless hoped to return to France in an American uniform once the United States entered the war. He joined the U.S. Army in 1943, and soon found himself with General Patton's old "Hell-on-Wheels" division at Omaha Beach, then in Paris at the time of its liberation, and later at the Battle of the Bulge. The final chapter concludes with Brombert's return to America, his enrollment at Yale University, and the beginning of a literary voyage whose origins are poignantly captured in this coming-of-age story. Trains of Thought is a virtuosic accomplishment, and a memoir that is likely to become a classic account of both memory and experience.

    Essays also highlight the ideological conflict between Westernization and Russiafication, and the revolution that brought down the Romanovs in 1917.

    The translated documents tell the story of the KGB's methods and targets and should interest the general public as well as the specialist.

    He advances what he believes is a commonsensical notion: a state's domestic identity has an enormous effect on its international policies. Hopf argues that foreign policy elites are inextricably bound to their own societies; in order to understand other states, they must first understand themselves. To comprehend Russian and Soviet foreign policy, "it is just as important to read what is being consumed on the Moscow subway as it is to conduct research in the Foreign Ministry archives," the author says. Hopf recreates the major currents in Russian/Soviet identity, reconstructing the "identity topographies" of two profoundly important years, 1955 and 1999. To provide insights about how Russians made sense of themselves in the post-Stalinist and late Yeltsin periods, he not only uses daily newspapers and official discourse, but also delves into works intended for mass consumption-popular novels, film reviews, ethnographic journals, high school textbooks, and memoirs. He explains how the different identities expressed in these varied materials shaped the worldviews of Soviet and Russian decisionmakers. Hopf finds that continuous renegotiations and clashes among competing domestic visions of national identity had a profound effect on Soviet and Russian foreign policy. Broadly speaking, Hopf shows that all international politics begins at home.

    

    This book accompanies an exhibition held at the museum from 2002-2003 of these, and other artefacts, dating largely from the first millennium BC. Four short essays discuss the land and people, the types of artefacts within the collection and the legacy of the people of the Eurasian steppes. The main body of the book includes a catalogue of artefacts arranged by object type accompanied by colour photographs.

    These provocative ideas gave rise to cultural and political innovations that were exported and adopted worldwide. Wherever there was discontent with modern existence or traditional societies were undergoing transformation, anti-Western sentiments arose. Many people perceived the Russian soul as the antithesis of the capitalist, imperialist West and turned to Russian ideas for inspiration and even salvation.Steven Marks shows that in this turbulent atmosphere of the past century and a half, Russia's lines of influence were many and reached far. Russia gave the world new ways of writing novels. It launched cutting-edge trends in ballet, theater, and art that revolutionized contemporary cultural life. The Russian anarchist movement benignly shaped the rise of vegetarianism and environmentalism while also giving birth to the violent methods of modern terrorist organizations. Tolstoy's visions of nonviolent resistance inspired Gandhi and the U.S. Civil Rights movement at the same time that Russian anti-Semitic conspiracy theories intoxicated right-wing extremists the world over. And dictators from Mussolini and Hitler to Mao and Saddam Hussein learned from the experiments of the Soviet regime.Moving gracefully from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Beijing and Berlin, London and Luanda, Mexico and Mississippi, Marks takes us on an intellectual tour of the Russian exports that shaped the twentieth century. The result is a richly textured and stunningly original account of the extent to which Russia--as an idea and a producer of ideas--has contributed to the making of the modern world. Placing Russia in its global context, the book betters our understanding of the anti-Western strivings that have been such a prominent feature of recent history.

    From the bowels of New York and Punk clubs in San Francisco, to Pyongyang, North Korea, and Moscow on a fake visa, Schonherr is a cineaste on a mission: He is attacked by feminists; witness to the final gig of shock-rocker GG Allin; employee in the world's cheapest film-to-video transfer shop; and proprietor of a rat-house cinema.Trashfilm Roadshows is a film book like no other.

    Small sticker residue on back cover.Software CD INCLUDED. Price lowered accordingly. 48 Contiguous states shipping rate only, HI, PR and INT'L buyers have to contact me for different shipping price.

    This civilizing mission sought to lay the foundations for a rejuvenated, 'modern' empire, unified by imperial citizenship, patriotism, and a shared secular culture. Evidence for Brower's thesis is drawn from major archives in Uzbekistan and Russia. Use of these records permitted him to develop the first interpretation, either in Russian or Western literature, of Russian colonialism in Turkestan that draws on the extensive archival evidence of policy-making, imperial objectives, and relations with subject peoples.

    Focusing on the key Volga city of Saratov and the surrounding region, Donald Raleigh is the first historian to fully show how the experience of civil war embedded itself into both the people's and the state's outlook and behavior. He demonstrates how and why the programs and ideals that had propelled the Bolsheviks into power were so quickly lost and the repressive Soviet party-state was born.Experiencing Russia's Civil War is based on exhaustive use of previously classified local and central archives. It is also bold and ambitious in its breadth of thematic coverage, dealing with all aspects of the war experience from institutional evolution and demographics to survival strategies. Complicating our understanding of this formative period, Raleigh provides compelling evidence that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were already adumbrated and practiced by the early 1920s, as Bolshevism became closed to real alternatives. Raleigh interprets this as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology, and dire political, economic, and military crises starting with World War I and strongly reinforced by the indelible, mythologized experience of survival in the Civil War.Fluidly written, replete with new information, and always engaged with important questions, this is history finely wrought.

    In his interpretation of this relationship from the Russian point of view, Alexander Lukin shows how over the course of three centuries China has seemed alternately to threaten, mystify, imitate, mirror, and rival its northern neighbor. Lukin traces not only the changing dynamics of Russian-Chinese relations but the ways in which Russia's images of China more profoundly reflected Russia's self-perception and its perceptions of the West as well. As both Russia and China take distinctive approaches to political and economic development and integration in the twenty-first century global economy, this reinterpretation of their relationship is timely and valuable not only to historians but to all students of international affairs.

    Analyzing the "languages of the lash"—the official definitions and discussions of corporal punishment—Schrader explores the relationship between the punishment of social deviants and the stability of the imperial Russian state. Interpreting penal law and practice in a broad social and political context, she illuminates the process by which Russia developed and reformulated corporal punishment from the era of Catherine the Great to the revolution of 1905. In law and in practice, imperial Russian officials mapped and remapped society as they articulated various languages of punishment. One map was social: the lower classes were punished corporally while the nobility and educated members of society were exempt from corporal punishment. Another map was geographical, in that non-Russian ethnic groups and people exiled to Siberia were treated differently from those who lived in the Russian center. Biological differences constituted yet another map of society, as the young, the very old, women, and the infirm were regarded as weaker than able-bodied men and therefore less able to withstand corporal punishments. Schrader's broad study enriches our understanding of the political, cultural, and social processes at work in Imperial Russia. Tracing penal reform over nearly two centuries, she challenges standard assumptions about Russian history and the roles of gender, the body, and ethnicity in political and cultural discourse.

    Written by a respected team of Russian scholars and linguists, Nachalo presents grammar functionally and teaches students the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing within the context of a wealth of cultural information. The abundant practice material in Nachalo ranges from focused and controlled to open-ended and communicative. Nachalo features an on-going story set in Russia with a cast of Russian and American characters, exposing students to new vocabulary and structures in authentic situations. Most exciting of all, Nachalo includes the most extensive package of support materials for any beginning Russian text on the market, including a video tied specifically to the text, shot on location in Moscow. The Second Edition is even more powerful with a text-specific Website and an all new student CD-ROM.

    Valentina Tereshkova was not a pilot, but a factory worker who parachuted as a hobby. Her letter applying for cosmonaut training was plucked from thousands of others, and led to her becoming one of the most decorated women in the Soviet Union. The book includes never-before-published photos of Tereshkova and other cosmonauts!