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Moscow in the 1930s: A Novel from the Archives reveals Moscow as it was in a bygone age, a city now found only on old maps, but an era that continues to haunt us today. The novel features a wide cast of characters, who are all tied together by the author herself. The reader plunges into the remarkable Moscow literary scene of those days, and literature aficionados will encounter within a number of important locations for the history of Russian letters: the Dobrov house, Peredelkino, Lavrushinsky Lane, Borisoglebsky Lane - and also the names of legendary figures such as Olga Bessarabova, Maria Belkina, and Lydia Libedinskaya. History is brought to life: the author introduces the reader to Leo...
The book is a substantial contribution to international Dostoevsky research, exploring Dostoevsky’s contemporary relevance from a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective. It offers some fresh readings of Dostoevsky’s texts, presenting new complex studies on the writer and his works in the mirror of several arts of the last three decades. The book is divided into three Parts, featuring researchers from Bulgaria, Great Britain, Russia and Ukraine. Part One deals with conceptual issues, treating Dostoevsky above all as a prophet and philosopher, and thus determines the ideological system of coordinates for the studies presented in the rest of the book. Part Two examines Dostoevsky’s legacy through the lenses of literary theory, music, and Illustration art, and Part Three, via world cinema and theatre. The volume has gathered together an array of original and innovative studies from world leading experts in Dostoevsky’s creative universe, to make an authoritative input into the field.
Moscow in the 1930s: A Novel from the Archives reveals Moscow as it was in a bygone age, a city now found only on old maps, but an era that continues to haunt us today. The novel features a wide cast of characters, who are all tied together by the author herself. The reader plunges into the remarkable Moscow literary scene of those days, and literature aficionados will encounter within a number of important locations for the history of Russian letters: the Dobrov house, Peredelkino, Lavrushinsky Lane, Borisoglebsky Lane – and also the names of legendary figures such as Olga Bessarabova, Maria Belkina, and Lydia Libedinskaya. History is brought to life: the author introduces the reader to Leonid Andreyev, leads us on a tour of the side-streets and alleyways of the Arbat district, and shows us the tattered notebooks of Olga Bessarabova. All this has long since fallen away into history, but now it proves so easily accessible to us.
I’ve been happy since the morning. Delighted, even. Everything seems so splendidly transient to me. That dust, from which thou art and unto which thou shalt return — it tempts me. And that’s why I wander about these roads, these woods, among the nearby houses, from which waft the aromas of fried pork chops, chicken soup, fish, diapers, steamed potatoes for the pigs; I lose my eye-sight, and regain it again. I don’t know what life is, Ola, but I’m holding on to it. Thus speaks the narrator of Rafał Wojasiński’s novel Olanda. Awarded the prestigious Marek Nowakowski Prize for 2019, Olanda introduces us to a world we glimpse only through the window of our train, as we hurry from o...
A young boy from the housing estates comes across a copse of old oaks to which he can escape, as to an oasis of calm. Although he may forget about it once he becomes an adult and “puts aside the things of childhood,” it will remain a locus of balance, decades later, for a single mother struggling with the difficulties of raising the child she loves. A husband, on the lip of an ugly divorce, drives across town in the middle of the night to rescue his wife, abandoned by her lover, and then — as she falls asleep in the car — takes the long way home, to prolong a moment such as he has not experienced in years. An elderly doctor, self-diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, makes use of the...
The characters in Novikov’s work are predominantly people of the Russian North: Pomors, Karelians and Komi. In 2013 Novikov, along with other Karelian writers, proclaimed the Manifesto on a New Northern Prose, the mission of which Novikov described as: “Though these are trying times for Russian literature, there is light, there is hope that it will retain its key underlying principles of honesty, faith, beauty. How great it is that these principles fully fit with and correspond to the old and new, living, and strong direction of Russia’s Northern Prose!” *** The protagonist of A Flame Out at Sea heads to the stores of the northern lakes and the White Sea in search of its present, whi...
Jaroslav Hašek is known by readers around the world as the author of The Good Soldier Švejk, one of the greatest comic novels of all time. Not all of his fans are aware of his six year anabasis in Russia, however, which began with his capture on the front lines of Galicia during the First World War. The Secret History of My Sojourn in Russia, translated by Charles S. Kraszewski, brings that fascinating period in Hašek's life to the attention of the English reader. Comprised of fifty-two short stories and other writings from Hašek's stay in Sovietising Russia, The Secret History collects the Bugulma stories, in which Hašek trains his satirical eye on the infant communist utopia, as well ...
In December 1970, amid a harsh winter and an even harsher economic situation, the ruling communist regime in Poland chose to drastically raise prices on basic foodstuffs. Just before the Christmas holidays, for example, the price of fish, a staple of the traditional Christmas Eve meal, rose nearly 20%. Frustrated citizens took to the streets to protest, demanding the repeal of the price-hikes. Things took an especially dramatic turn in the northern regions near the Baltic shore — later, the cradle of the Solidarity movement, which would eventually spark the fall of communism in Poland and throughout Central and Eastern Europe — where the government moved against their citizens with the M...
Although he never left his native Kraków except for relatively short periods, Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907) achieved worldwide fame, both as a painter, and Poland’s greatest dramatist of the first half of the twentieth century. Acropolis: the Wawel Plays, brings together four of Wyspiański’s most important dramatic works in a new English translation by Charles S. Kraszewski. All of the plays centre on Wawel Hill: the legendary seat of royal and ecclesiastical power in the poet’s native city, the ancient capital of Poland. In these plays, Wyspiański explores the foundational myths of his nation: that of the self-sacrificial Wanda, and the struggle between King Bolesław the Bold...