Author: Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Fyodor Dostoevsky & Ivan Turgenev
Publisher: Jaico Publishing House
ISBN: 8179922200
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
New Reformatted Edition A compilation of classic short stories by 5 great Russian writers: Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev. Though not necessarily representative of the authors’ complete works, the stories have been carefully chosen to showcase their versatility and skill as storytellers. The collection covers an extraordinary range of themes, styles and settings, allowing the reader to get a glimpse of another world gone by. Even though these stories seem timeless, the characters in them show the same foibles, fears and hopes as people in the brave new world of the 21st century.
Author: Mikhail Bulgakov
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802190510
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Satan comes to Soviet Moscow in this critically acclaimed translation of one of the most important and best-loved modern classics in world literature. The Master and Margarita has been captivating readers around the world ever since its first publication in 1967. Written during Stalin’s time in power but suppressed in the Soviet Union for decades, Bulgakov’s masterpiece is an ironic parable on power and its corruption, on good and evil, and on human frailty and the strength of love. In The Master and Margarita, the Devil himself pays a visit to Soviet Moscow. Accompanied by a retinue that includes the fast-talking, vodka-drinking, giant tomcat Behemoth, he sets about creating a whirlwind of chaos that soon involves the beautiful Margarita and her beloved, a distraught writer known only as the Master, and even Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate. The Master and Margarita combines fable, fantasy, political satire, and slapstick comedy to create a wildly entertaining and unforgettable tale that is commonly considered the greatest novel to come out of the Soviet Union. It appears in this edition in a translation by Mirra Ginsburg that was judged “brilliant” by Publishers Weekly. Praise for The Master and Margarita “A wild surrealistic romp. . . . Brilliantly flamboyant and outrageous.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The Detroit News “Fine, funny, imaginative. . . . The Master and Margarita stands squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative.” —Saul Maloff, Newsweek “A rich, funny, moving and bitter novel. . . . Vast and boisterous entertainment.” —The New York Times “The book is by turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative and poignant. . . . A great work.” —Chicago Tribune “Funny, devilish, brilliant satire. . . . It’s literature of the highest order and . . . it will deliver a full measure of enjoyment and enlightenment.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: Chris Miller
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674916441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
An illuminating account of RussiaÕs attemptsÑand failuresÑto achieve great power status in Asia. Since Peter the Great, Russian leaders have been lured by opportunity to the East. Under the tsars, Russians colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii. The Trans-Siberian Railway linked Moscow to Vladivostok. And Stalin looked to Asia as a sphere of influence, hospitable to the spread of Soviet Communism. In Asia and the Pacific lay territory, markets, security, and glory. But all these expansionist dreams amounted to little. In We Shall Be Masters, Chris Miller explores why, arguing that RussiaÕs ambitions have repeatedly outstripped its capacity. With the core of the nation concentrated thousands of miles away in the European borderlands, RussiaÕs would-be pioneers have always struggled to project power into Asia and to maintain public and elite interest in their far-flung pursuits. Even when the wider population professed faith in AsiaÕs promise, few Russians were willing to pay the steep price. Among leaders, too, dreams of empire have always been tempered by fears of cost. Most of RussiaÕs pivots to Asia have therefore been halfhearted and fleeting. Today the Kremlin talks up the importance of Òstrategic partnershipÓ with Xi JinpingÕs China, and Vladimir PutinÕs government is at pains to emphasize Russian activities across Eurasia. But while distance is covered with relative ease in the age of air travel and digital communication, the East remains far off in the ways that matter most. Miller finds that RussiaÕs Asian dreams are still restrained by the countryÕs firm rooting in Europe.
Author: Soili Sinisalo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Author: Andy McSmith
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620970791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
In this dazzling exploration of one of the most contradictory periods of literary and artistic achievement in modern history, journalist Andy McSmith evokes the lives of more than a dozen of the most brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Taking us deep into Stalin’s Russia, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch asks the question: can great art be produced in a police state? For although Josif Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history, under him Russia also produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense and lasting power—from the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam to the opera Peter and the Wolf, the film Alexander Nevsky, and the novels The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago. For those artists visible enough for Stalin to take an interest in them, it was Stalin himself who decided whether they lived in luxury or were sent to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police, to be tortured and sometimes even executed. McSmith brings together the stories of these artists—including Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Dmitri Shostakovich, and many others—revealing how they pursued their art under Stalin’s regime and often at great personal risk. It was a world in which the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose bright yellow tunic was considered a threat to public order under the tsars, struggled to make the communist authorities see the value of avant garde art; Babel publicly thanked the regime for allowing him the privilege of not writing; and Shostakovich’s career veered wildly between public disgrace and wealth and acclaim. In the tradition of Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth and Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch is an extraordinary work of historical recovery. It is also a bold exploration of the triumph of art during terrible times and a book that will stay with its readers for a long, long while.
Author: Yelena Nesterova
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Itinerant painters
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Author: David Brown
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393315851
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is the most up-to-date body of musical knowledge ever gathered together. The New Grove composer biographies have been selected from the dictionary to bring the finest of the biographies to a wider audience. Each has been expanded and updated for book publication and contains a comprehensive work-list, index, and fully revised bibliography, in addition to the definitive view of the subject's life and works. The great traditions of Russian music began in the mid-19th century with Mikhail Glinka—the father figure for the next generations of Russian composers. His direct heirs were 'The Five,' or 'The Mighty Handful,' drawn together by Mily Balakirev, the teacher of two leading figures in the group: Alexander Borodin, creator of Prince Igor and quartets of an unmistakably Russian flavor, and Modest Musorgsky, creator of the greatest Russian epics of the lyric stage. Slightly apart from this group because of his more cosmopolitan approach to his art stands the most-loved of all Russian composers, the ever-appealing Tchaikovsky.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: George Saunders
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1984856049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”—Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.
Author: Lev Alburt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393324525
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Increase your skill and understanding of chess with the tactics that have produced unparalleled Russian grandmasters.
