The prospect of a summer job as a tour guide at the Pushkin Hills Preserve offers him hope of regaining some balance in life as his wife makes plans to emigrate to the West with their daughter Masha, but during Alikhanov’s stay in the rural estate of Mikhaylovskoye, his life continues to unravel.Populated with unforgettable characters—including Alikhanov’s fellow guides Mitrofanov and Pototsky, and the KGB officer Belyaev—Pushkin Hills ranks among Dovlatov’s renowned works The Suitcase and The Zone as his most personal and poignant portrayal of the Russian attitude towards life and art.

    There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Porphyry. One of the great classic novels of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

    In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalized and conveyed with the poetic verve and playfulness of form that have made Shklovsky a major figure in twentieth-century world literature. In addition to its fictional and biographical elements, Third Factory includes anecdotes, rants, social satire, literary theory, and anything else that Shklovsky, with an artist's unerring confidence, chooses to include.

    From the siege of Parliament to the farcically tilted elections of 1996, from the rubble of Grozny to the grandiose wealth and naked corruption of today's Moscow, Remnick chronicles a society so racked by change that its citizens must daily ask themselves who they are, where they belong, and what they believe in. Remnick composes this panorama out of dozens of finely realized individual portraits. Here is Mikhail Gorbachev, his head still swimming from his plunge from reverence to ridicule. Here is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the half-Jewish anti-Semite who conducts politics as loony performance art. And here is Boris Yeltsin, the tottering populist who is not above stealing elections. In Resurrection, they become the players in a drama so vast and moving that it deserves comparison with the best reportage of George Orwell and Michael Herr."This is what happens when a good writer unleashes eye and ear on a story that moves with the speed of light. Resurrection has the feel of describing vast, historical change even as it is happening."--Chicago Tribune

    Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for any good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves. Sofia Petrovna offers a rare and vital record of Stalin's Great Purges.

    It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator—Tsypkinis on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything "right." Nothing is invented, everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay (which appeared in The New Yorker), Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and celebrates the happy event of its publication in America with an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel.

    Some of the stories here were collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral tales by four of the greatest writers in Russian literature: Nadezhda Teffi, Pavel Bazhov, Andrey Platonov, and Alexander Pushkin, author of Eugene Onegin, the classic Russian novel in verse. Among the many classic stories included here are the tales of Baba Yaga, Vasilisa the Beautiful, Father Frost, and the Frog Princess.

    Someone has murdered his father and Vlad can’t rest until he finds the killer. When the trail leads to an art gallery, Vlad wants to dig deeper, but he needs help from the owner’s daughter. The pretty redhead is far too innocent for a man like Vlad, but he’ll do what it takes to get the information he needs. His obligations are to the family, even if that means using the fiery woman. Madison O’Connor works hard to keep her family’s gallery going, although secretly she has little interest in art. But when she discovers her father’s been laundering money for the Russian Mafia, she’ll do everything she can to keep him out of jail. She hates to lie, but she has a plan…seduce the Russian bad boy to learn the mob’s secrets. Never mind his dangerous exterior or icy blue eyes, Madison’s going to get her family free of the mob, even if she has to use Vlad Karev to do it. As the killer gets closer, so do Vlad and Madison. But is their connection just the means to an end, or could their romance be real?

    Updating his acclaimed History of Twentieth-Century Russia through 2002, Robert Service provides a panoramic perspective on a country whose Soviet past encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror, and two world wars. He shows how seven decades of communist rule, which penetrated every aspect of Soviet life, continue to influence Russia today. This new edition also discusses continuing economic and social difficulties at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the military campaign in Chechnya, and Russia's reduced role on the world stage.

    He joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to find a cache of missing jewels which were hidden in some chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the bejeweled chairs takes these unlikely heroes from the provinces to Moscow to the wilds of Soviet Georgia and the Trans-caucasus mountains; on their quest they encounter a wide variety of characters: from opportunistic Soviet bureaucrats to aging survivors of the prerevolutionary propertied classes, each one more selfish, venal, and ineffective than the one before.

    The text, which follows Nicholas & Alexandria from their childhood's to the Siberian cellar where their lives ended, is complemented by rare images from the imperial family's private collections (locked away for decades in Soviet archives, & published here for the first time), as well as by contemporary full-color photographs of the places & palaces the Romanovs knew.

    The relentless and unstoppable German advances that had seen the panzers sweep hundreds of miles into Russia was finally brought to a halt. The elite German 6th Army was first fought to a standstill, then surrounded and forced to surrender.Over 1.5 million people lost their lives during the six months of fighting, many of them civilians caught up in the campaign. For the first time in the war, the German army had been defeated on the field of battle. Before Stalingrad the Russians never won; after Stalingrad they could not lose.This book looks at the titanic struggle that ended in the total destruction of the second city of the Soviet Union, the greatest battle the world has ever seen.

    The poems are prefaced by a thoughful introduction by the poet Joseph Brodsky, a friend of Akhmatova in her later years.

    After disappearing from the Deputy Inspector's face, his nose shows up around town before returning to its proper place.

    Set far from Moscow in the remote Kazakhstan capital of Alma-Ata, The Keeper of Antiquities begins with a leisurely, almost scholarly air - like a devious story by Borges. But very soon we find ourselves watching with horror as professional rivalry between the keeper of the town's museum and the chief librarian turns into a deadly struggle for control over the meaning of the past - and therefore over the present.While Dombrovsky does not have the wit, the suave cynicism of Bulgakov, he is-or was-immensely drawn to the tragi-comic potential of the bureaucratic flap, endemically Russian. Water boils drearily for tea in noisily peopled conferences; lank-jawed, heavily smoking females whine and bark in outrage; minor officials threaten and soothe; mass grievances are unburdened. The narrator is an open-hearted, straightforward young man with the title of Keeper of Antiquities in the archaeological section of a museum in rural Soviet Central Asia. The Keeper is moderately happy in his eyrie of catalogues and modest displays, sharing varieties of pickling alcohol with an earthy old carpenter and enjoying a secret hoard of carnival views of ""Beauties of the World"" in their natural state. His aim is to go quietly on his way ""without interfering with anybody."" But ""Your business is history"" to prove and demonstrate, and there is no escape. An attempt to improve the local library by a critical comment; the friendship with a collective brigade leader whose brother was shot (unjustly?) as a traitor; the defense of a young archaeologist fired by the library-all forbode disaster. The keeper of pristine truths unsullied by expedient exploitation thinks of flight, but in the end simply waits for the closing in of ""history,"" party style. A spirited, often anguished, indictment of mindless officialdom wherever it appears.