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From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture. Included are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature - including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn - alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of communism or the torture of the prison camps, they offer a wonderfully wide-ranging and exciting representation of one of the most vital and enduring forms of Russian literature.
An enthralling, elegant, emotional account of a journey into exile, by the wonderful Teffi Moscow, 1918. Following the Revolution, people are leaving the city in droves - bound for the Black Sea, and from there to Europe and beyond. In late autumn, the celebrated writer Teffi is invited on a reading tour; having elegantly navigated the bureaucratic waters for her visa, she spends the winter travelling from Moscow to Kiev, and from there to Odessa and on to Novorossisk, first by train and then by ship. On the shores of the Black Sea, as Spring arrives, Teffi is advised to go abroad for a time, until things have settled down in Russia. She reluctantly agrees, not fully realising that this woul...
America is at war and the stakes are huge. The fight isn't just in Iraq and Afghanistan; it's a global contest between the United States, radical Islam, a resurgent Russia, and a virulent New Left coming to power in Latin America and stalking the corridors of power around the world. These three enemies of America are separate, but still cooperate -- and in his stunning new book, Shadow World, Robert Chandler shows how.
An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, po...
Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.
This biography by a distinguished California historian gives an underappreciated artist and his work recognition long overdue. Focusing on Grafton Tyler Brown's lithography and his life in nineteenth-century San Francisco, Robert J. Chandler offers a study equally fascinating as a business and cultural history and as an introduction to Brown the artist.
Masterful stories of faith and superstition from a much-loved Russian author, in English for the first time 'A magnificent edition of the works of a writer who deserves her seat at the top table of Russian authors' Sara Wheeler, Wall Street Journal These stories conjure a vanished Russia, where Orthodox Christianity coexists with the shapeshifters and house spirits of ancient folk belief. Celebrated for her sublime wit and graceful style, Teffi here plumbs the darker aspects of psychology, infusing tales of domestic conflict with the occult spirituality that thrived in the country of her youth. A young girl, haunted by the sinister sound of a church bell, resolves to become first a brigand, then a saint. A reluctant participant in a pilgrimage to the Solovetsky Islands has a shatteringly profound experience. A recently married couple's relationship becomes strained as they each silently nurse the fear that their maid is a witch. By turns playful and profound, solemn and drily sceptical, these tales of other worlds precisely illuminate human desires, fears and failings.
'One of the great novels of the 20th century' Observer In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini plan the huge offensive on the Eastern Front that will culminate in the greatest battle in human history. Hundreds of miles away, Pyotr Vavilov receives his call-up papers and spends a final night with his wife and children in the hut that is his home. As war approaches, the Shaposhnikov family gathers for a meal: despite her age, Alexandra will soon become a refugee; Tolya will enlist in the reserves; Vera, a nurse, will fall in love with a wounded pilot; and Viktor Shtrum will receive a letter from his doomed mother which will haunt him forever. The war will consume the lives of a huge cast of charac...
Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich’s contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art—which he called Suprematism—and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, Aleksandra Shatskikh sheds new light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian avant-garde. Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square's meanings. This process engend...
A short yet fascinating account of Russia's most celebrated writer. In Robert Chandler's exquisite biography, literary giant Alexander Pushkin, lauded as the Russian Shakespeare, is examined as writer, lover and public figure. Chandler explores his relationship to politics and provides a fascinating glimpse of the turbulent history Pushkin lived through. The book acts as a succinct guide to anybody trying to understand Russia's most celebrated literary figure and also illuminates the wider historical and political context of early nineteenth-century Russia.