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Showing 1 - 17 of
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Oblivion (Paperback)
Sergei Lebedev; Translated by Antonina W. Bouis
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R270
R220
Discovery Miles 2 200
Save R50 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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One of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the
legacy of the Soviet prison camp system by one of Russia's finest
young writers. A young man travels to the vast wastelands of the
Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbour who saved
his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds,
among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags,
is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both
the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a
terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined
beauty of a land where man and machine worked in tandem with nature
to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging
from today's Russia, where the ills of the past are being
forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel
represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the
brink of oblivion.
Edvard Radzinsky is justly famous as both a biographer and a
dramatist, and he brings both skills to bear in this vivid,
page-turning, rich portrait of one of the greatest of all Romanovs.
Alexander II was Russia's Lincoln -- he freed the serfs, promised a
new, more liberal state for everyone, yet was brought down by a
determined group of terrorist anarchists who tried to kill him six
times before finally, fatefully, succeeding. His story proves the
timeless lesson that in Russia, it is dangerous to start reforms,
but even more dangerous to stop them. It also shows that the traps
and dangers encountered in today's war on terrorists were there 150
years ago.
From the critically acclaimed author of Oblivion comes Year of the
Comet, a story of a Russian boyhood and coming of age as the Soviet
Union is on the brink of collapse. An idyllic childhood takes a
sinister turn. Rumours of a serial killer haunt the neighbourhood,
families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the
country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters
overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols
of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning.
Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams,
transforming a very public moment into something tender and
personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight
about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the
world.
From the author of Untraceable, a novel about history both personal
and political, and the mysteries of the past. The Goose Fritz tells
the story of a young Russian named Kirill, the sole survivor of a
once numerous clan of German origin, who delves relentlessly into
the unresolved past. His ancestor, Balthasar Schwerdt, migrated to
the Russian Empire in the early 1800s, bringing with him the
practice of alternative medicine and becoming captive to an erratic
nobleman who had supplied dwarves, hunchbacks from Africa, and
magicians to entertain Catherine the Great. Kirill's investigation
takes us through centuries of turmoil during which none of the
German's nine children or their descendants can escape their
adoptive country's cruel fate. Intent on uncovering buried
mysteries, Kirill searches archives and cemeteries across Europe,
while pressing witnesses for keys to understanding. The Goose Fritz
illuminates both personal and political history in a passion-filled
family saga about an often confounding country that has long
fascinated the world.
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A Dog's Heart (Paperback)
Mikhail Bulgakov; Translated by Antonina W. Bouis
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R246
R203
Discovery Miles 2 030
Save R43 (17%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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"There is absolutely no necessity to learn how to read; meat smells
a mile off, anyway. Nevertheless, if you live in Moscow and have a
brain in your head, you'll pick up reading willy-nilly, and without
attending any courses. Out of the forty thousand or so Moscow dogs,
only a total idiot won't know how to read the word 'sausage'." When
a stray dog dying on the streets of Moscow is taken in by a wealthy
professor, he is subjected to medical experiments in which he
receives various transplants of human organs. As he begins to
transform into a rowdy, unkempt human by the name of Poligraf
Poligrafovich Sharikov, his actions distress the professor and
those surrounding him, although he finds himself accepted into the
ranks of the Soviet state. A parodic reworking of the Frankenstein
myth and a vicious satire of the Communist revolution and the
concept of the New Soviet man, A Dog's Heart was banned by the
censors in 1925 and circulated only in samizdat form. Nowadays this
hugely entertaining tale has become very popular in Russia, and has
inspired many adaptations across the world.
How did Andrei Sakharov, a theoretical physicist and the
acknowledged father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, become a human
rights activist and the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize?
In his later years, Sakharov noted in his diary that he was "simply
a man with an unusual fate." To understand this deceptively
straightforward statement by an extraordinary man, The World of
Andrei Sakharov, the first authoritative study of Andrei Sakharov
as a scientist as well as a public figure, relies on previously
inaccessible documents, recently declassified archives, and
personal accounts by Sakharov's friends and colleagues to examine
the real context of Sakharov's life.
In the course of doing so, Gennady Gorelik answers a fascinating
question, whether the Soviet hydrogen bomb was really fathered by
Sakharov, or whether it was based on stolen American secrets.
Gorelik concludes that while espionage did initiate the Soviet
effort, the Russian hydrogen bomb was invented independently.
Gorelik also elucidates the reasons that brought about the
seemingly sudden transformation of the top-secret physicist into a
public figure in 1968, when Sakharov's famous essay "Progress,
Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" was distributed in
samizdat in the USSR and smuggled out to the West. Recently
declassified documents show that Sakharov's metamorphosis was
caused by professional concerns, particularly regarding the
development of an anti-ballistic missile defense. An insider's view
of how the upper echelons of the Soviet regime functioned had led
Sakharov to the conclusion that the goals of peace, progress, and
human rights were inextricably linked. His free thinking and free
feeling were manifested in his hope that scientific thought and
religious perception would find a profound synthesis in the future.
In a dilapidated and isolated old house, something peculiar seems
to happen whenever the town's bestial exterminator visits. On a
seemingly bucolic country estate, the head of the household is a
living corpse obsessed with other corpses. An adolescent boy who
passes his days in private dream worlds experiences a sexual
awakening spurred by his family's scandalous tenant. In these and
other stories, the modernist writer Alexei Remizov offers a
panorama of Russian mythology, the supernatural, rural grotesques,
and profound religious faith in fiery revolutionary settings.
Alexei Remizov was one of the greatest writers of the Russian
symbolist movement of the early twentieth century. In the thirteen
stories collected in this volume, his exceptional stylistic
achievements are on full display. Equally drawing on rural
colloquial speech, the language of Russian fairy tales, and the
customs of the Old Believers and Russian Orthodoxy, they transport
the reader into a mysterious world in between uncanny folktales and
encroaching modernity. The Little Devil and Other Stories includes
works from across Remizov's career, encompassing his thematic
preoccupations and stylistic experimentation. Antonina W. Bouis's
translation captures Remizov's many registers to offer
English-language readers a sampling of a remarkable Russian writer.
In a dilapidated and isolated old house, something peculiar seems
to happen whenever the town's bestial exterminator visits. On a
seemingly bucolic country estate, the head of the household is a
living corpse obsessed with other corpses. An adolescent boy who
passes his days in private dream worlds experiences a sexual
awakening spurred by his family's scandalous tenant. In these and
other stories, the modernist writer Alexei Remizov offers a
panorama of Russian mythology, the supernatural, rural grotesques,
and profound religious faith in fiery revolutionary settings.
Alexei Remizov was one of the greatest writers of the Russian
symbolist movement of the early twentieth century. In the thirteen
stories collected in this volume, his exceptional stylistic
achievements are on full display. Equally drawing on rural
colloquial speech, the language of Russian fairy tales, and the
customs of the Old Believers and Russian Orthodoxy, they transport
the reader into a mysterious world in between uncanny folktales and
encroaching modernity. The Little Devil and Other Stories includes
works from across Remizov's career, encompassing his thematic
preoccupations and stylistic experimentation. Antonina W. Bouis's
translation captures Remizov's many registers to offer
English-language readers a sampling of a remarkable Russian writer.
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The Suitcase (Paperback)
Sergei Dovlatov; Translated by Antonina W. Bouis
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R265
R215
Discovery Miles 2 150
Save R50 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Several years after emigrating from the USSR, the author discovers
the battered suitcase he had brought with him gathering dust at the
back of a wardrobe. As he opens the suitcase, the items he finds
inside take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov
inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them. A
poplin shirt evokes a story of courtship and marriage, a pair of
boots calls up the hilarious conclusion to an official banquet, two
pea-green crepe socks bring back memories of his attempt to become
a black-market racketeer, while a double-breasted suit reminds him
of when he was approached by the KGB to spy on a Swedish writer.
Imbued with a comic nostalgia and overlaid with Dovlatov's
characteristically dark-edged humour and wry power of observation,
The Suitcase is a profoundly human, delightfully ironic novel from
one of the finest satirists of the twentieth century.
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Oblivion (Paperback)
Sergei Lebedev; Translated by Antonina W. Bouis
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R460
R390
Discovery Miles 3 900
Save R70 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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In one of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe
the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to
the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a
shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as
Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines and
decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to
oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the
executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This
disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where
man and machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy millions of
lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today's Russia,
where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public
memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to
rescue history from the brink of oblivion. Sergei Lebedev was born
in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological
expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. His first novel,
Oblivion, has been translated into many languages.
The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has survived through 250
years of tsars, assassinations, fires, revolutions, and two world
wars to become a global cultural destination housing one of the
largest collections of art in the world. In an extraordinary
memoir, the museum's longtime director takes the reader on a
private tour of this global treasure. Holding one of the largest
collections of Western and Oriental art in the world, the Hermitage
is also a product of Russia and its dramatic history. Founded by
Empress Catherine the Great in 1764, the stunning Winter Palace was
built to house her growing collection of Old Masters and to serve
as a home for the imperial family. Tsars came and went over the
years, bloodily or peacefully, artworks were acquired and sold,
buildings were burned down in terrible fires, and still the
collections grew. After the violent upheavals of the Russian
Revolution in 1917, the palaces and collections were opened to the
public, ultimately enduring even the three-year siege of Leningrad
(now St. Petersburg) by the Nazis in World War II. Now, in an
unprecedented collection of illuminating essays, Piotrovsky
explores the cultural history of a collection as rich in adventure
as art. From fascinating intrigues, such as the Impressionist
masterpieces recovered in Germany after World War II and hidden
from the public for fifty years, to revelatory scholarship on the
collection's incredible art and artifacts, these authoritative and
engaging anecdotes make for an exceptional read. My Hermitage is a
profound and captivating story of art's timelessness and how it
brings people together.
Marina Goldovskaya is one of Russia's best-known documentary
filmmakers. The first woman in Russia (and possibly the world) to
combine being a director, writer, cinematographer, and producer,
Goldovskaya has made over thirty documentary films and more than
one hundred programs for Russian, European, Japanese, and American
television. Her work, which includes the award-winning films The
House on Arbat Street, The Shattered Mirror, and Solovky Power, has
garnered international acclaim and won virtually every prize given
for documentary filmmaking. In Woman with a Movie Camera,
Goldovskaya turns her lens on her own life and work, telling an
adventurous, occasionally harrowing story of growing up in the
Stalinist era and subsequently documenting Russian society from the
1960s, through the Thaw and Perestroika, to post-Soviet Russia. She
recalls her childhood in a Moscow apartment building that housed
famous filmmakers, being one of only three women students at the
State Film School, and working as an assistant cameraperson on the
first film of Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia's most celebrated director.
Reviewing her professional filmmaking career, which began in the
1960s, Goldovskaya reveals her passion for creating films that
presented a truthful picture of Soviet life, as well as the
challenges of working within (and sometimes subverting) the
bureaucracies that controlled Russian film and television
production and distribution. Along the way, she describes a host of
notable figures in Russian film, theater, art, and politics, as
well as the technological evolution of filmmaking from film to
video to digital media. A compelling portrait of a woman who broke
gender and political barriers, as well as the eventful four decades
of Russian history she has documented, Woman with a Movie Camera
will be fascinating reading for a wide audience.
A growing complacency that stability has been restored in the wake
of recent economic turmoil is not just wishful thinking, it is
dangerous thinking This book directly confronts uncomfortable
questions that many prefer to brush aside: if economists and other
scholars, politicians, and business professionals understand the
causes of economic crises, as they claim, then why do such damaging
crises continue to occur? Can we trust business and intellectual
elites who advocate the principles of Realpolitik and claim the
"public good" as their priority, yet consistently favor
maximization of profit over ethical issues? Former deputy prime
minister of Russia Grigory Yavlinsky, an internationally respected
free-market economist, makes a powerful case that the often-cited
causes of global economic instability-institutional failings, wrong
decisions by regulators, insufficient or incorrect information, and
the like-are only secondary to a far more significant underlying
cause: the failure to understand that universal social norms are
essential to thriving businesses and social and economic progress.
Yavlinsky explores the widespread disregard for moral values in
business decisions and calls for restoration of principled behavior
in politics and economic practices. The unwelcome alternative, he
warns, will be a twenty-first-century global economy in the grip of
unending crises.
Maya Plisetskaya, one of the world’s foremost dancers, rose to
become a prima ballerina of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet after an
early life filled with tragedy and loss. In this spirited memoir,
Plisetskaya reflects on her personal and professional odyssey,
presenting a unique view of the life of a Soviet artist during the
troubled period from the late 1930s to the 1990s. Plisetskaya
recounts the execution of her father in the Great Terror and her
mother’s exile to the Gulag. She describes her admission to the
Bolshoi in 1943, the roles she performed there, and the endless
petty harassments she endured, from both envious colleagues and
Party officials. Refused permission for six years to tour with the
company, Plisetskaya eventually performed all over the world,
working with such noted choreographers as Roland Petit and Maurice
Béjart. She recounts the tumultuous events she lived through and
the fascinating people she met—among them the legendary ballet
teacher Agrippina Vaganova, George Balanchine, Frank Sinatra,
Rudolf Nureyev, and Dmitri Shostakovich. And she provides
fascinating details about testy cocktail-party encounters with
Khrushchev, tours abroad when her meager per diem allowance brought
her close to starvation, and KGB plots to capitalize on her
friendship with Robert Kennedy. Gifted, courageous, and brutally
honest, Plisetskaya brilliantly illuminates the world of Soviet
ballet during an era that encompasses both repression and cultural
détente. Still prima ballerina assoluta with the Bolshoi Ballet,
Maya Plisetskaya also travels around the world performing and
lecturing. At the Bolshoi’s gala celebrating her 75th birthday,
President Vladimir Putin presented her with Russia’s highest
civilian honor, the medal for service to the Russian state, second
degree. Tim Scholl is professor of Russian language and literature
at Oberlin College. Antonina W. Bouis is the prize-winning
translator of more than fifty books, including fiction, nonfiction,
and memoirs by such figures as Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, and
Dmitri Shostakovich.
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Oblivion (MP3 format, CD)
Sergei Lebedev; Translated by Antonina W. Bouis; Read by Daniel Gamburg
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R699
R527
Discovery Miles 5 270
Save R172 (25%)
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Out of stock
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