Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Nikolai is a loser. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Andrei gives him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer. Nikolai takes what he can, but that doesn't mean he's grateful. Griping, sulking, grovelingly abject, he despises everything Andrei believes in, even if he envies him his every breath.Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha's anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.Marian Schwartz's new English translation of Envy brilliantly captures the energy of Olesha's masterpiece.A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

    In this volume, Dr. Leatherbarrow shows that far from being merely a philosophical religious tract, The Brothers Karamazov is an enjoyable and accessible novel. He discusses its major themes, including atheism and belief, the nature of man, socialism and individualism, and the state of European civilization, focusing particulary on those themes of justice, order and disorder, in whose revolutionary treatment he sees the real significance of this literary landmark.

       Vica, Vadik, Sergey and Regina met in Russia in their school days, but remained in touch and now have very different American lives. Sergey cycles through jobs as an analyst, hoping his idea for an app will finally bring him success. His wife Vica, a medical technician struggling to keep her family afloat, hungers for a better life. Sergey’s former girlfriend Regina, once a famous translator is married to a wealthy startup owner, spends her days at home grieving over a recent loss. Sergey’s best friend Vadik, a programmer ever in search of perfection, keeps trying on different women and different neighborhoods, all while pining for the one who got away.   As Sergey develops his app—calling it "Virtual Grave," a program to preserve a person's online presence after death—a formidable debate begins in the group, spurring questions about the changing perception of death in the modern world and the future of our virtual selves. How do our online personas define us in our daily lives, and what will they say about us when we're gone?

    

    has dared to take on a difficult, grief-stricken period of English history, and done so with sensitivity and understanding; EARTH AND HEAVEN is the clever, compelling result' The Times

    Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.

    His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create.Darkness at Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he relives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of one man's solitary agony, it asks questions about ends and means that have relevance not only for the past but for the perilous present. It is —- as the Times Literary Supplement has declared —- "A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualized drama."

    Hope Against Hope was first published in English in 1970. It is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with Osip, who was first arrested in 1934 and died in Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38. Hope Against Hope is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin's Soviet Union and one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. But it is also a profound inspiration--a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate of circumstances.

    Former Bolshoi ballerina Nina Revskaya auctions off her jewelry collection and becomes overwhelmed by memories of her homeland, the friends she left behind amidst Stalinist aggression, and the dark secret that brought her to a new life in Boston.

    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

    A middle-aged man, Andreas Feldt, feeling that he is unable to communicate with his adult daughter over the course of a friendly lunch, announces on an inexplicable whim that he is going to get a divorce. Though his daughter is initially shocked, she quickly assimilates this information and all returns to normal. Faced with this virtual invisibility—for no matter what actions he takes, the world seems to take no notice—Andreas is cut adrift from the certainties of his life and forced to navigate through a society where it seems virtually everyone is only one loss of self-control away from an explosion of dissatisfaction and rage.

    It contains a graphic description of the worst year of the Civil War.

    Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen-name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In pre-revolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and 1930s, she wrote some of her finest stories in exile in Paris, recalling her unforgettable encounters with Rasputin, and her hopeful visit at age thirteen to Tolstoy after reading War and Peace. In this selection of her best autobiographical stories, she covers a wide range of subjects, from family life to revolution and emigration, writers and writing. Like Nabokov, Platonov, and other great Russian prose writers, Teffi was a poet who turned to prose but continued to write with a poet’s sensitivity to tone and rhythm. Like Chekhov, she fuses wit, tragedy, and a remarkable capacity for observation; there are few human weaknesses she did not relate to with compassion and understanding.

    But Bunin's other stories are not to be missed. In Sunstroke, Graham Hettlinger has selected the "Gentleman" and twenty-four other stories and translated them afresh—several for the first time in English. The result is a collection that is remarkable in its crystalline prose, surprising in its vibrancy. It includes, among others, "Raven," "Cold Fall," "Muza," "Styopa," "Antigone," "In Paris," and "Late Hour." Never has the last of the great "gentry" writers and the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature received a more caring and passionate translation. The lyric impulse that motivated so much of Bunin's writing is evident throughout the stories in Sunstroke. In the prose miniatures, such as "Summer Day" and "Sky Above a Wall," he seeks only to capture a momentary impression or a passing scene rather than to write a traditional narrative. And even in his longer works, Bunin displays little interest in exploring the psychology of his characters or creating detailed plots. Instead these stories are primarily shaped by an urge to express both the intense, sensual pleasure of existence and the tragic fleetingness of life. Thus, even as they depict a wide range of affairs, seductions, betrayals, and deaths, they tend to read more like poetry than potboilers, delivering their most powerful effects through the rhythms and pacing of their sentences, their highly detailed, sensuous imagery, and the connotative richness of their language.Sunstroke confirms Bunin's stature as one of the greatest—and most neglected—Russian writers of the twentieth century.

    Failing to gain recognition for his music in his native United States, he achieved celebrity in South America in the early 1960s and then, unbelievably, became the biggest rock star in the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the Lenin Prize and his icons were sold alongside those of Josef Stalin. His albums went gold from Bulgaria to Berlin. He made highly successful movies and, naively earnest, was an unwitting acolyte for socialism; everywhere he went, he was mobbed by his fans. And then, in 1986, at the height of his fame, right after 60 Minutes had devoted a segment to him, finally giving him the recognition he had never attained at home, he drowned in mysterious circumstances in East Berlin.Drawn magnetically to his story, Reggie Nadelson pursued the mystery of Dean Reed's life and death across America and Eastern Europe, her own journey mirroring his. As she traveled, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union crumbled, and Reed became an increasingly alluring figure, his life an unrepeatable tale of the Cold War world. Encountering the characters— musicians and DJs, politicians and public figures, lovers and wives—who peopled Reed's life, Nadelson was drawn further and further into a seedy, often hilarious subculture of sex, politics, and rock 'n' roll. Part biography, part memoir and personal journey, Comrade Rockstar is an unforgettable chronicle of an utterly improbable life