Moscow Diary

Moscow Diary PDF Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674587441
Category : Authors, German
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description

Moscow Diary

Moscow Diary PDF Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674587441
Category : Authors, German
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description


Earthly Signs

Earthly Signs PDF Author: Marina Tsvetaeva
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371634
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva’s unique poetics. Includes black and white photographs.

A Russian Diary

A Russian Diary PDF Author: Anna Politkovskaya
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307497631
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia’s most fearless journalists, was gunned down in a contract killing in Moscow in the fall of 2006. Just before her death, Politkovskaya completed this searing, intimate record of life in Russia from the parliamentary elections of December 2003 to the grim summer of 2005, when the nation was still reeling from the horrors of the Beslan school siege. In A Russian Diary, Politkovskaya dares to tell the truth about the devastation of Russia under Vladimir Putin–a truth all the more urgent since her tragic death. Writing with unflinching clarity, Politkovskaya depicts a society strangled by cynicism and corruption. As the Russian elections draw near, Politkovskaya describes how Putin neutralizes or jails his opponents, muzzles the press, shamelessly lies to the public–and then secures a sham landslide that plunges the populace into mass depression. In Moscow, oligarchs blow thousands of rubles on nights of partying while Russian soldiers freeze to death. Terrorist attacks become almost commonplace events. Basic freedoms dwindle daily. And then, in September 2004, armed terrorists take more than twelve hundred hostages in the Beslan school, and a different kind of madness descends. In prose incandescent with outrage, Politkovskaya captures both the horror and the absurdity of life in Putin’s Russia: She fearlessly interviews a deranged Chechen warlord in his fortified lair. She records the numb grief of a mother who lost a child in the Beslan siege and yet clings to the delusion that her son will return home someday. The staggering ostentation of the new rich, the glimmer of hope that comes with the organization of the Party of Soldiers’ Mothers, the mounting police brutality, the fathomless public apathy–all are woven into Politkovskaya’s devastating portrait of Russia today. “If anybody thinks they can take comfort from the ‘optimistic’ forecast, let them do so,” Politkovskaya writes. “It is certainly the easier way, but it is also a death sentence for our grandchildren.” A Russian Diary is testament to Politkovskaya’s ferocious refusal to take the easier way–and the terrible price she paid for it. It is a brilliant, uncompromising exposé of a deteriorating society by one of the world’s bravest writers. Praise for Anna Politkovskaya “Anna Politkovskaya defined the human conscience. Her relentless pursuit of the truth in the face of danger and darkness testifies to her distinguished place in journalism–and humanity. This book deserves to be widely read.” –Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent, CNN “Like all great investigative reporters, Anna Politkovskaya brought forward human truths that rewrote the official story. We will continue to read her, and learn from her, for years.” –Salman Rushdie “Suppression of freedom of speech, of expression, reaches its savage ultimate in the murder of a writer. Anna Politkovskaya refused to lie, in her work; her murder is a ghastly act, and an attack on world literature.” –Nadine Gordimer “Beyond mourning her, it would be more seemly to remember her by taking note of what she wrote.” –James Meek

Stafford Cripps in Moscow, 1940-1942

Stafford Cripps in Moscow, 1940-1942 PDF Author: Sir Richard Stafford Cripps
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780853037408
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Stafford Cripps cut an incongruous figure in British politics in the 1930s. His fortuitous appointment as Ambassador to Moscow in 1940 secured him a prominent position in the War Cabinet. His meticulously kept diary describes the change in his political fortune and bears witness to key German-Soviet events during World War 2.

The Maisky Diaries

The Maisky Diaries PDF Author: Gabriel Gorodetsky
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300217331
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
The terror and purges of Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain’s drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, Churchill’s rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front. Maisky was distinguished by his great sociability and access to the key players in British public life. Among his range of regular contacts were politicians (including Churchill, Chamberlain, Eden, and Halifax), press barons (Beaverbrook), ambassadors (Joseph Kennedy), intellectuals (Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), writers (George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells), and indeed royalty. His diary further reveals the role personal rivalries within the Kremlin played in the formulation of Soviet policy at the time. Scrupulously edited and checked against a vast range of Russian and Western archival evidence, this extraordinary narrative diary offers a fascinating revision of the events surrounding the Second World War.

Time of Troubles

Time of Troubles PDF Author: Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691631936
Category : College teachers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Among the few diaries available from inside early Soviet Russia none approaches Iurii V. Got'e's in sustained length of coverage and depth of vivid detail. Got'e was a member of the Moscow intellectual elite--a complex and unusually observant man, who was a professor at Moscow University and one of the most prominent historians of Russia at the time the revolution broke out. Beginning his first entry with the words Finis Russiae, he describes his life in revolution-torn Moscow from July 8, 1917 through July 23, 1922--nearly the entire period of the Russian Revolution and Civil War up to the advent of the New Economic Policy. This remarkable chronicle, published here for the first time, describes the hardships undergone by Got'e's family and friends and the gradual takeover of the academic and professional sectors of Russia by the new regime. Got'e was in his mid-forties when he wrote the diary. At first he felt that Bolshevism meant complete doom for Russia, but eventually his ardent patriotism led him to accept the Bolsheviks' role in preserving the integrity of the Russian state. The diary was discovered in 1982 in the Hoover Institution Archives, in the papers of Frank Golder, to whom Got'e himself had entrusted it in 1922. It is translated literally and unabridged, with annotations by Terence Emmons. The introduction by Professor Emmons places the diary clearly in the context of Got'e's life and scholarly career. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Day Will Pass Away

The Day Will Pass Away PDF Author: Ivan Chistyakov
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681774976
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
A rare first-person testimony of the hardships of a Soviet labor camp—long suppressed—that will become a cornerstone of understanding the Soviet Union. Originally written in a couple of humble exercise books, which were anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow, this remarkable diary is one of the few first-person accounts to survive the sprawling Soviet prison system. At the back of these exercise books there is a blurred snapshot and a note, "Chistyakov, Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937-38. Killed at the front in Tula Province in 1941." This is all that remains of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labour Camp. Who was this lost man? How did he end up in the gulag? Though a guard, he is a type of prisoner, too. We learn that he is a cultured and urbane ex-city dweller with a secret nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia. In this diary, Chistyakov does not just record his life in the camp, he narrates it. He is a sharp-eyed witness and a sympathetic, humane, and broken man. From stumblingly poetic musings on the bitter landscape of the taiga to matter-of-fact grumbles about the inefficiency of his stove, from accounts of the brutal conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is an astonishing record—a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia, and modern Europe.

The Moscow Puzzles

The Moscow Puzzles PDF Author: Boris A. Kordemsky
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486270785
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A collection of math and logic puzzles features number games, magic squares, tricks, problems with dominoes and dice, and cross sums, in addition to other intellectual teasers.

The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears, 1936-1978

The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears, 1936-1978 PDF Author: Peter Pears
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780851157412
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
PETER PEARS's reputation as an outstanding and distinctive tenor is grounded in his interpretations of Benjamin Britten's works; their partnership of thirty years significantly shaped and defined musical developments not only in England but on a broader plane. Throughout their busy professional lives they travelled extensively, on concert tours and on holiday, finding fresh stimulus in change. Pear's twelve travel diaries, brought together in this volume, record much of that travel and provide valuable contextual material on the musical development of both Pears and Britten. The first diary dates from 1936, the year before his friendship with Britten began, when he went on tour to North America with the New English Singers. Other diaries record the five-month tour to the Far East and the important encounters (especially for Britten) with the gamelan music of Bali and the Japanese Noh theatre; visits to Russia as guests of Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, where they met significant figures from Russian musical life; and attendance at the Ansbach Bach Festival when Pears was at the height of his career. Also recorded are holidays in the Caribbean and Italy, a concert tour through the north of England, and accounts of the rehearsals and performances of the New York premieres of Billy Budd and Death in Venice.

Cursed Days

Cursed Days PDF Author: Ivan Alekseevich Bunin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1566635160
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The Nobel PrizeDwinning author's great anti-Bolshevik diary of the Russian Revolution, translated into English for the first time, with an Introduction and Notes by Thomas Gaiton Marullo. A harrowing description of the forerunners of the concentration camps and the Gulag. Marc Raeff"