Reissue.

    The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as “Mama,” based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father’s downfall. The girl grows up struggling with the discovery that the parents she cherishes in memory are part of a collective nightmare that everyone else wants to forget. The Road also includes the complete text of Grossman’s harrowing report from Treblinka, one of the first anatomies of the workings of a death camp; “The Sistine Madonna,” a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life. Meticulously edited and presented by Robert Chandler, The Road allows us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.

    Passionate, provocative, flamboyant, controversial, he was lionized by Maxim Gorki and hailed alongside Leo Tolstoy. Master of the dramatic, Andreyev's dark, horrifying, sensual visions prefigured absurdist theater and existentialist fiction. Almost a century later, they still strike to the heart.In this splendid volume, Andreyev's granddaughter, Olga Andreyev Carlisle--an accomplished writer herself--offers vibrant new translations of eight of his best stories. Here is Andreyev's famous "The Seven Who Were Hanged." Here, too, are the richly crafted tales "Abyss" and "Darkness." "The Red Laugh," his powerful delineation of apocalypse, is all the more remarkable for its prophecy of the threat of nuclear war. When first conceived, these stories rocked the political and literary camps of all Europe. Reading them today is haunting: the themes have grown in significance.Accompanied by Olga Carlisle's intimate introduction and complemented with Andreyev's own extraordinarily beautiful self portrait photography, this is truly a work of visions.

    Understanding its intellectual tradition and the way the intelligentsia have shaped the nation is crucial to understanding the Russia of today. This new history examines important intellectual and cultural currents (the Enlightenment, nationalism, nihilism, and religious revival) and key themes (conceptions of the West and East, the common people, and attitudes to capitalism and natural science) in Russian intellectual history. Concentrating on the Golden Age of Russian thought in the mid nineteenth century, the contributors also look back to its eighteenth-century origins in the flowering of culture following the reign of Peter the Great, and forward to the continuing vitality of Russia's classical intellectual tradition in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. With brief biographical details of over fifty key thinkers and an extensive bibliography, this book provides a fresh, comprehensive overview of Russian intellectual history.