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On August 19, 1991, eight high-ranking Soviet officials took over
the government of the USSR and proclaimed themselves its new
rulers. Less than seventy-two hours later, their coup had
collapsed, but it would change the course of history in a way that
no one - certainly not the plotters themselves - could have
foreseen. The editor of this volume, who witnessed these momentous
events, have assembled firsthand accounts of the attempted coup.
They include testimonies from "junta" members and military
officers, resistance leaders and ordinary citizens, Muscovites and
residents of other locales, Russian and foreign journalists,
foreign visitors and returning emigres, as well as Mikhail
Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Key documents and photographs
complement the individual accounts. The provocative introduction to
the volume places the August events in the larger context - from
the early days of perestroika and glasnost to the second
confrontation at the White House, in October 1993.
A literary cult figure on a par with Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel has
remained an enigma ever since he disappeared, along with his
archive, inside Stalin's secret police headquarters in May of 1939.
Made famous by "Red Cavalry," a book about the Russian civil war
(he was the world's first "embedded" war reporter), another book
about the Jewish gangsters of his native Odessa, and yet another
about his own Russian Jewish childhood, Babel has been celebrated
by generations of readers, all craving fuller knowledge of his
works and days. Bringing together scholars of different countries
and areas of specialization, the present volume is the first
examination of Babel's life and art since the fall of communism and
the opening of Soviet archives. Part biography, part history, part
critical examination of the writer's legacy in Russian, European,
and Jewish cultural contexts, "The Enigma of Isaac Babel" will be
of interest to the general reader and specialist alike.
For the major poets of Osip Mandelstam's generation, poetry
represented a calling in the most tangible sense. To respond to it
meant to fashion from the available cultural and personal material
a mythic self, one that could serve both as the organizing subject
for poetry and as an object of worshipful adoration. A successful
poet like Mandelstam thus became the focal point of a complex
cultural phenomenon-perhaps a charismatic cult-that shaped his
writings, gesture, and reception. Gregory Freidin examines
Mandelstam's legacy in this broader context and lays the groundwork
for approaching modernist Russian poetry as a charismatic
institution. He traces the interplay of poetic tradition, personal
background, historical events, religious culture, and political
developments as they entered the symbolic order of Mandelstam's art
and helped determine its outlines in the reader's imagination. Many
important aspects of the Mandelstam phenomenon, including the
Jewish theme, the meaning of the poet's Christianity, his political
stand, and, in particular, his conflict with Stalin and Stalinism,
receive here a new interpretation. A case study in the emergence of
a literary cult, "A Coat of Many Colors" reveals how Russian poetry
of the early twentieth century functioned as a charismatic
institution of a distinctly modern kind. Those who belonged to it
combined knowledge of the recent studies in myth, magic, and
religion with the cultivation of verbal magic, mythic
consciousness, and unorthodox religious beliefs. Following
Mandelstam's career over its entire span (1908-1938), Freidin shows
how the poet benefited from literary scholarship, comparative
mythology, the history and sociology of religion at the same time
he was emulating in his poetry the very subject of these academic
disciplines. To account for this duality in interpreting
Mandelstam's writings, Freidin draws on explanatory paradigms of
contemporary human sciences, from Saussure and the Formalists to
Weber, Durkheim, Freud, and Marcel Mauss.
What does the Congress do? How does it do it? Is the Congress up to
the challenges ahead? This primer offers students an introduction
to Congress and the role it plays in the US political system. It
explores the different political natures of the House and Senate,
and examines Congress's interaction with other branches of the
Federal government.
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