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This memoir of the author's twenty-year prison sentence spent in the Gulag Archipelago vividly portrays the harsh realities of Soviet prison camps
"A collection of letters, written by a most extraordinary and yet typical representative of the East European intelligentsia, sent from Moscow, Mostar, and more recently Paris and Rome, where the author has lived since leaving war-torn Bosnia." "Matvejevic first went to the USSR in 1972, as a guest of the Writers' Union, and described to his father the land that Matvejevic senior had not seen since leaving Odessa in 1921 (and that he would never see again in his lifetime). He chronicles the dissolution of the USSR, its final twenty years of existence, from the unique vantage point of a semi-insider - a half-Russian, non-aligned (Yugoslav) dissident intellectual rooted in the public debates and artistic life of both Western, Eastern and Central Europe. This story, moreover, parallels the simultaneous dissolution of Yugoslavia, to which the narrator refers increasingly as the book nears its end."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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A writer for whom the journey has always mattered reinvents the very form itself in this inviting collection of in-the-moment impressions of his journeys A writer of enormous erudition and wide-ranging travels, Claudio Magris selects for this volume writings penned during trips and wanderings over the span of several decades. He has traveled through these years with many beloved companions, to whom he dedicates the book, and sought the kind of journey “that occurs when you abandon yourself to [the gentle current of time] and to whatever life brings.” Taken together Magris’s essays share a clearly identified theme. They represent the motif of the journey in all its aspects—literary, metaphysical, spiritual, mythical, philosophical, historical—as well as the author’s comprehensive understanding of the subject or, one might say, of his own way of being in the world. Traveling from Spain to Germany to Poland, Norway, Vietnam, Iran, and Australia, he records particular moments and places through a highly personal lens. A writer’s writer and a reader’s traveler, Magris proves that wandering is equal part wondering.
Drawings from the Gulag consists of 130 drawings by Danzig Baldaev describing the history, horror and peculiarities of the Gulag system from its inception in 1918. Baldaev's father, a respected ethnographer, taught him techniques to record the tattoos of criminals in St Petersburg's notorious Kresty prison, where he worked as a guard. He was reported to the KGB who unexpectedly supported his work, allowing him the opportunity to travel across the former USSR.Witnessing scenes of everyday life in the Gulag, he chronicled this previously closed world from both sides of the wire. With every vignette, Baldaev brings the characters he depicts to vivid life: from the lowest zek (inmate) to the most violent tattooed vor (thief), all the practices and inhabitants of the Gulag system are depicted here in incredible, and often shocking, detail. In documenting the attitude of the authorities to those imprisoned, and the transformation of those citizens into survivors or victims of the Gulag system, this 'graphic novel' vividly depicts methods of torture and mass murder undertaken by the administration, as well as the atrocities committed by criminals on their fellow inmates.
'For once there had been false idols and asses' heads drawn on the walls...' Sleepers awake in a remote cave and the ancient mystic Simon Magus attempts a miracle, in these two magical, otherworldly tales from one of the greatest voices of twentieth-century Europe. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.
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This book is the first to deal with documentary aesthetic practices of the post-war period in Eastern Europe in a comparative perspective. The contributions examine the specific forms and modes of documentary representations and the role they played in the formation of new aesthetic trends during the cultural-political transition of the long 1960s. This documentary first-hand approach to the world aimed to break up unquestioned ideological structures and expose tabooed truths in order to engender much-needed social changes. New ways of depicting daily life, writing testimony or subjective reportage emerged that still shape cultural debates today.
Why did coinage, tyranny, and philosophy develop in the same time and place? Marc Shell explores how both money and language give "worth" by providing a medium of exchange, how the development of money led to a revolution in philosophical thought and language, and how words transform mere commodities into symbols at once aesthetic and practical. Offering carefully documented interpretations of texts from Heraclitus, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Ruskin, Shell demonstrates the kinship between literary and economic theory and production, introduces new methods of analyzing texts, and shows how literary and philosophical fictions can help us understand the world in which we live.