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Within a tightly controlled environment, literature has become the major screen onto which the political class of the People’s Republic of China projects some of its battles. This work explores the potential of literary analysis for illuminating the PRC’s social, intellectual, and political history, illustrating swings in the Party line with stories, articles, and cartoons from the popular press. This book presents materials hitherto scarcely topped and should offer new insights to those interested in Chinese literature, Russian and East European literature, and modern social and political history.
The Russian writer Lydia Ginzburg (1902–90) is best known for her Notes from the Leningrad Blockade and for influential critical studies, such as On Psychological Prose, investigating the problem of literary character in French and Russian novels and memoirs. Yet she viewed her most vital work to be the extensive prose fragments, composed for the desk drawer, in which she analyzed herself and other members of the Russian intelligentsia through seven traumatic decades of Soviet history. In this book, the first full-length English-language study of the writer, Emily Van Buskirk presents Ginzburg as a figure of previously unrecognized innovation and importance in the literary landscape of the...
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When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he intended to capture Leningrad before turning on Moscow. Soviet resistance forced him to change tactics: with his forward troops only thirty kilometres from the city's historic centre, he decided instead to starve it out. Using newly available diaries and government records, Anna Reid describes a city's descent into hell - the breakdown of electricity and water supply; subzero temperatures; the consumption of pets, joiner's glue and face cream; the dead left unburied where they fell - but also the extraordinary endurance, bravery and self-sacrifice, despite the cruelty and indifference of the Kremlin.
First published in 1986, Soviet Fiction since Stalin presents a comprehensive overview of the literature of the post Stalin period in the Soviet Union. The rapid advances in science and technology in these years are reflected in the themes of many of the major novelists – Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Daniel and Grossman- and scientific subjects frequently offer a vehicle for the exploration of the wider socio-political, moral, and philosophical ideas. As the period advances, however, literature becomes the first medium in which to express mistrust of scientific advance, and hence, indirectly, of Soviet policy as a whole. Rosalind J. Marsh uses a broad definition of ‘science’ whi...
Based on author's Ph.D. thesis, from University of Oxford, 2005.
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Revised, Expanded Edition Based on exclusive, personal interviews with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Pearce's biography of the renowned Russian dissident provides profound insight into a towering literary and political figure. From his pro-Communist youth to his imprisonment in forced labor camps, from his exile in America to his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn struggled with the weightiest questions of human existence: When a person has suffered the most terrible physical and emotional torture, what becomes of his spirit? Can science, politics and economics truly provide all of man's needs? In his acclaimed literary and historical works, Solzhenitsyn exposed the brutality of the Soviet regi...
In 1957--long before colleges awarded degrees in creative nonfiction and back when newspaper writing's reputation was tainted by the fish it wrapped--Princeton began honoring talented literary journalists. Since then, fifty-nine of the finest, most dedicated, and most decorated nonfiction writers have held the Ferris and McGraw professorships. This monumental volume harbors their favorite and often most influential works. Each contribution is rewarding reading, and collectively the selections validate journalism's ascent into the esteem of the academy and the reading public. Necessarily eclectic and delightfully idiosyncratic, the fifty-nine pieces are long and short, political and personal,...