Author: Robert Littell
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647000033
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147
Book Description
A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell Leon Rozental—ten and a half, intellectually precocious, and possessing a disarming candor—is suddenly alone after the death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors. Now on his own and hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, the massive building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work, Leon starts to explore. One day, after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet official with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. In this taut and layered novel, New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell deploys his deep knowledge of this complex period in Russian history and masterful talent for captivating storytelling to create a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing Stalin’s human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inflicted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible narrator—and not unlike Holden Caulfield, whom he admits to identifying with—caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.
Comrade Koba
Author: Robert Littell
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647000033
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147
Book Description
A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell Leon Rozental—ten and a half, intellectually precocious, and possessing a disarming candor—is suddenly alone after the death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors. Now on his own and hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, the massive building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work, Leon starts to explore. One day, after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet official with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. In this taut and layered novel, New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell deploys his deep knowledge of this complex period in Russian history and masterful talent for captivating storytelling to create a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing Stalin’s human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inflicted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible narrator—and not unlike Holden Caulfield, whom he admits to identifying with—caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647000033
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147
Book Description
A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell Leon Rozental—ten and a half, intellectually precocious, and possessing a disarming candor—is suddenly alone after the death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors. Now on his own and hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, the massive building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work, Leon starts to explore. One day, after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet official with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. In this taut and layered novel, New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell deploys his deep knowledge of this complex period in Russian history and masterful talent for captivating storytelling to create a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing Stalin’s human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inflicted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible narrator—and not unlike Holden Caulfield, whom he admits to identifying with—caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.
The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader
Author: Various
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142437575
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 644
Book Description
Clarence Brown's marvelous collection introduces readers to the most resonant voices of twentieth-century Russia. It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy; and poetry by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142437575
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 644
Book Description
Clarence Brown's marvelous collection introduces readers to the most resonant voices of twentieth-century Russia. It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy; and poetry by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Koba the Dread
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307368297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience. Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307368297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience. Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.
Stalin
Author: Ronald Grigor Suny
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202710
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 912
Book Description
"This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenins, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202710
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 912
Book Description
"This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenins, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--
Stalin
Author: Mikl¢s Kun
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639241190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500
Book Description
This exceptional volume of oral history contains exciting new information about Stalin's actual and political 'family', the political Mafia and the clans around him. The author has interviewed key politicians who survived the Stalin era. Kun's special expertise and his access to archival sources in Russia have resulted in a work revealing jealously guarded secrets. In addition to the interviews and hitherto unpublished correspondence between Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Zhdanov and others, the book also contains a fascinating selection from a private collection of photos of Stalin, his family members, and various political actors of the period.
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639241190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500
Book Description
This exceptional volume of oral history contains exciting new information about Stalin's actual and political 'family', the political Mafia and the clans around him. The author has interviewed key politicians who survived the Stalin era. Kun's special expertise and his access to archival sources in Russia have resulted in a work revealing jealously guarded secrets. In addition to the interviews and hitherto unpublished correspondence between Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Zhdanov and others, the book also contains a fascinating selection from a private collection of photos of Stalin, his family members, and various political actors of the period.
Stalin
Author: Leon Trotsky
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608467724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1155
Book Description
On 20th August 1940 Trotsky’s life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice pick crashing down on his head. Among the works left unfinished was the second part of his biography of Stalin. Trotsky’s Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain some of the most decisive events of the 20th century, not just in terms of epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events. How did it come about that Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended as a tyrant and a monster? Was this something pre-ordained by genetic factors or childhood upbringing? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to these questions. In the present edition we have brought together all the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published.
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608467724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1155
Book Description
On 20th August 1940 Trotsky’s life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice pick crashing down on his head. Among the works left unfinished was the second part of his biography of Stalin. Trotsky’s Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain some of the most decisive events of the 20th century, not just in terms of epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events. How did it come about that Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended as a tyrant and a monster? Was this something pre-ordained by genetic factors or childhood upbringing? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to these questions. In the present edition we have brought together all the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published.
The Real Stalin
Author: Yves Delbars
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351786660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586
Book Description
In this book, originally published in English in 1953, the author, recognized as one of the best-informed experts on Eastern European politics, reconstructed during the course of a decade's work, the real history of Stalin, from his youth in Georgia to the last year of his life. Utilizing an enormous mass of largely unpublsihed documents he reconstructed a living Stalin with all his qualities and faults, crimes and achievements. He tells the secrets of Stalin's rise to power and of the extraordinary complexity and effectiveness of his tactics which can be seen in his attitude towards the problems of Marxist philosophy, in his attitude towards the German Question and his role as military commander.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351786660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586
Book Description
In this book, originally published in English in 1953, the author, recognized as one of the best-informed experts on Eastern European politics, reconstructed during the course of a decade's work, the real history of Stalin, from his youth in Georgia to the last year of his life. Utilizing an enormous mass of largely unpublsihed documents he reconstructed a living Stalin with all his qualities and faults, crimes and achievements. He tells the secrets of Stalin's rise to power and of the extraordinary complexity and effectiveness of his tactics which can be seen in his attitude towards the problems of Marxist philosophy, in his attitude towards the German Question and his role as military commander.
DEATH ONLY WINS: THE STALIN TRILOGY
Author: Ravi Ravindranathan
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1483691160
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 710
Book Description
Early Stalin, the first volume in a forthcoming trilogy of historical fiction on the life of Joseph Stalin entitled Death Only Wins, tells the story of the future Soviet dictator in two parts, Caucasus and Siberia: In and Out. It recounts Stalin's abysmal childhood, his mother's efforts to get him into the Orthodox priesthood, his ecclesiastical education, his expulsion from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, his life as an organizer of robberies to fund Lenin's revolutionary enterprises, his first marriage, the death of his wife, his love affairs, his trips abroad, and his many arrests, exiles, and escapes from Siberia. Always in the background of the novel is the land of Georgia with its splendid food and wine, spectacular beauty, literature, customs, and culture in general as well as the harshness of the Siberian landscape. A major purpose of the first volume is to provide clues to Stalin's behaviour as ruler of the Soviet Union, an explanation of how Stalin became Stalin.
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1483691160
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 710
Book Description
Early Stalin, the first volume in a forthcoming trilogy of historical fiction on the life of Joseph Stalin entitled Death Only Wins, tells the story of the future Soviet dictator in two parts, Caucasus and Siberia: In and Out. It recounts Stalin's abysmal childhood, his mother's efforts to get him into the Orthodox priesthood, his ecclesiastical education, his expulsion from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, his life as an organizer of robberies to fund Lenin's revolutionary enterprises, his first marriage, the death of his wife, his love affairs, his trips abroad, and his many arrests, exiles, and escapes from Siberia. Always in the background of the novel is the land of Georgia with its splendid food and wine, spectacular beauty, literature, customs, and culture in general as well as the harshness of the Siberian landscape. A major purpose of the first volume is to provide clues to Stalin's behaviour as ruler of the Soviet Union, an explanation of how Stalin became Stalin.
Stalin
Author: Nigel Cawthorne
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 1848589514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
'Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.' Joseph Stalin Worshipped by the Russians as a great leader, Stalin was one of modern history's greatest tyrants, rivalling Hitler, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. But he probably had more blood on his hands than any of them. Born Josef Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia in 1879, Stalin studied to be a priest while secretly reading the works of Karl Marx. Politics soon became his religion and, under his ruthless rule, up to 60 million people perished. Peasants who resisted Stalin's policy of collectivisation were denounced as Kulaks, arrested and shot, exiled or worked to death in his ever-expanding network of concentration camps, the Gulag. Nobody was safe, not even his friends, his family or his political allies. This is the story of a man who never let up for a second in his pursuit of absolute power.
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 1848589514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
'Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.' Joseph Stalin Worshipped by the Russians as a great leader, Stalin was one of modern history's greatest tyrants, rivalling Hitler, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. But he probably had more blood on his hands than any of them. Born Josef Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia in 1879, Stalin studied to be a priest while secretly reading the works of Karl Marx. Politics soon became his religion and, under his ruthless rule, up to 60 million people perished. Peasants who resisted Stalin's policy of collectivisation were denounced as Kulaks, arrested and shot, exiled or worked to death in his ever-expanding network of concentration camps, the Gulag. Nobody was safe, not even his friends, his family or his political allies. This is the story of a man who never let up for a second in his pursuit of absolute power.
In Plain Russian
Author: Владимир Войнович
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
ISBN:
Category : Russian fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
Verhalen, autobiografische schetsen en brieven waarin kritiek wordt geleverd op toestanden in Sovjet-Rusland.
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
ISBN:
Category : Russian fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
Verhalen, autobiografische schetsen en brieven waarin kritiek wordt geleverd op toestanden in Sovjet-Rusland.