Letters: Summer 1926


Boris PasternakYelena Pasternak - 1926
    AzadovskyThe summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond, exchanging a series of searching letters in which every aspect of life and work is discussed with extraordinary intensity and passion. Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.

Unforgiving Years


Victor Serge - 1971
    Victor Serge’s final work, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.The novel is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D’s friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

Most Beautiful Princess


Christina Croft - 2008
    Petersburg to the back streets of Moscow. Through intrigues, assassination, war and revolution, to the tragedy of her own horrific murder, she remained true to her calling to bring beauty into the world. Based on the true story of 'the most beautiful princess in Europe', this novel is written in tribute to a remarkable and courageous woman.

The Noise of Time: Selected Prose


Osip Mandelstam - 1925
    Osip Mandelstam has in recent years come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. Though known primarily as a poet, Mandelstam worked in many styles: autobiography, short story, travel writing, and polemic. Mandelstam's biographer, Clarence Brown, presents a collection of the poet's prose works that illuminates his far-ranging talent and places him within the canon of European modernism.This volume includes Mandelstam's "The Noise of Time, " a series of autobiographical sketches; "The Egyptian Stamp, " a novella echoing Gogol and Dostoevsky; "Fourth Prose, " and the famous travel memoirs "Theodosia" and "Journey to Armenia."

On the Name


Jacques Derrida - 1995
    What happens, above all, when it is necessary to sur-name, renaming there where, precisely, the name comes to be found lacking? What makes the proper name into a sort of sur-name, pseudonym, or cryptonym at once singular and singularly untranslatable?"Jacques Derrida thus poses a central problem in contemporary language, ethics, and politics, which he addresses in a liked series of the three essays. Passions: "An Oblique Offering" is a reflection on the question of the response, on the duty and obligation to respond, and on the possibility of not responding—which is to say, on the ethics and politics of responsibility. Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum) considers the problematics of naming and alterity, or transcendence, raised inevitably by a rigorous negative theology. Much of the text is organized around close readings of the poetry of Angelus Silesius.The final essay, Khora, explores the problem of space or spacing, of the word khora in Plato's Tmaeus. Even as it places and makes possible nothing less than the whole world, khora opens and dislocates, displaces, all the categories that govern the production of that world, from naming to gender. In addition to readers in philosophy and literature, Khora will be of special interest to those in the burgeoning field of "space studies"(architecture, urbanism, design).

Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective


Daniel B. Clendenin - 1994
    In addition to updated demographic information, Clendenin examines at length a particular aspect of Orthodoxy's intersection with Protestantism—its growing exchange with evangelicalism.

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation


Serhii Plokhy - 2017
    While the world watched in outrage, this blatant violation of national sovereignty was only the latest iteration of a centuries-long effort to expand Russian boundaries and create a pan-Russian nation.In Lost Kingdom, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the nation's history. Spanning over 2,000 years, from the end of the Mongol rule to the present day, Plokhy shows how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin exploited existing forms of identity, warfare, and territorial expansion to achieve imperial supremacy.An authoritative and masterful account of Russian imperialism, Lost Kingdom chronicles the story behind Russia's belligerent nation-building quest.

God and the State


Mikhail Bakunin - 1882
    Born into the Russian nobility, he renounced his hereditary rank in protest against Czarist oppression and fled to Western Europe. A colorful, charismatic personality, Bakunin quickly became central to the anarchism movement, and everyone involved either built upon or reacted to his ideas. Yet Bakunin, despite the power of his ideas, was primarily a man of action, and he wrote little. His only major work, God and the State, remained unfinished, although it is the torso of a giant.God and the State has been a basic anarchist and radical document for generations. It is one of the clearest statements of the anarchist philosophy of history: religion by its nature is an impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity. It is the weapon of the state. It must be smashed, according to Bakunin, before the right of self-determination can be possible. As an introduction to anarchist thought, a manifesto of atheism, or as a summing-up of the thoughts of Bakunin, God and the State remains a mind-opening experience, even for those basically unsympathetic to its premise.

Running on Waves


Alexander Grin - 1926
    Content of the novel is based upon background of sea travel, heroes have portraits for the characters. Action is running in the "invented" places, whose names resemble names of the real cities in Crimea. Novel was written in 1928.

The Meaning of Love


Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov - 1894
    Love is important, not only as one of our feelings but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very center of our lives...."The meaning of human love, speaking generally, is the justification and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism. On this general basis we can also ... explain the meaning of sexual love" (Vladimir Solovyov) What is the meaning of love's intense emotion? Solovyov points to the spark of divinity that we see in another human being and shows how this "living ideal of Divine love, antecedent to our love, contains in itself the secret of the idealization of our love."According to Solovyov, love between men and women has a key role to play in the mystical transfiguration of the world. Love, which allows one person to find unconditional completion in another, becomes an evolutionary strategy for overcoming cosmic disintegration.

God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition


Alasdair MacIntyre - 2009
    Because of a need to better understand Catholic philosophical thought, especially in the context of its historical development and realizing that philosophers interact within particular social and cultural situations, MacIntyre offers this brief history of Catholic philosophy. Tracing the idea of God through different philosophers' engagement of God and how this engagement has played out in universities, MacIntyre provides a valuable, lively, and insightful study of the disintegration of academic disciplines with knowledge. MacIntyre then demonstrates the dangerous implications of this happening and how universities can and ought to renew a shared understanding of knowledge in their mission. This engaging work will be a benefit and a delight to all readers.

The Triads (Classics of Western Spirituality Series)


Gregory Palamas
    This, his greatest work, presents a defense in support of the monastic groups known as the hesychasts, the originators of the Jesus Prayer.

The Torrents of Spring, First Love, and Mumu


Ivan Turgenev - 1888
    According to Wikipedia: "Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev 1818 â€" 1883) was a Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction."

Rabelais and His World


Mikhail Bakhtin - 1965
    In Bakhtin's view, the spirit of laughter and irreverence prevailing at carnival time is the dominant quality of Rabelais's art. The work of both Rabelais and Bakhtin springs from an age of revolution, and each reflects a particularly open sense of the literary text. For both, carnival, with its emphasis on the earthly and the grotesque, signified the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture and the assertion of popular renewal. Bakhtin evokes carnival as a special, creative life form, with its own space and time.Written in the Soviet Union in the 1930s at the height of the Stalin era but published there for the first time only in 1965, Bakhtin's book is both a major contribution to the poetics of the novel and a subtle condemnation of the degeneration of the Russian revolution into Stalinist orthodoxy. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

A Train to Moscow


Elena Gorokhova - 2022
    When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and his tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage. After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are truly worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.