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No writer has captured the absurdity of the human condition as
acutely as Nikolai Gogol. In a lively new translation by Oliver
Ready, this collection contains his great classic stories - 'The
Overcoat', 'The Nose' and 'Diary of a Madman' - alongside lesser
known gems depicting life in the Russian and Ukrainian countryside.
Together, they reveal Gogol's marvelously skewed perspective,
moving between the urban and the rural with painfully sharp humour
and scorching satire. Strikingly modern in his depictions of
society's shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of
bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark
comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the
stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical
to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness
and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human
soul.
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Zero Train (Paperback)
Yuri Buida; Translated by Oliver Ready
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R195
Discovery Miles 1 950
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Set during the Soviet era, a remote, police-run settlement called
the Ninth Siding exists only for the mysterious Zero Train that
halts there.
'A truly great translation . . . This English version really is
better' - A. N. Wilson, The Spectator TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 This acclaimed new translation of
Dostoyevsky's 'psychological record of a crime' gives his dark
masterpiece of murder and pursuit a renewed vitality, expressing
its jagged, staccato urgency and fevered atmosphere as never
before. Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student,
wanders alone through the slums of St. Petersburg, deliriously
imagining himself above society's laws. But when he commits a
random murder, only suffering ensues. Embarking on a dangerous game
of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov
finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only
Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of
redemption. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was born in Moscow and
made his name in 1846 with the novella Poor Folk. He spent several
years in prison in Siberia as a result of his political activities,
an experience which formed the basis of The House of the Dead. In
later life, he fell in love with a much younger woman and developed
a ruinous passion for roulette. His subsequent great novels include
Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and
The Brothers Karamazov. Oliver Ready is Research Fellow in Russian
Society and Culture at St Antony's College, Oxford. He is general
editor of the anthology, The Ties of Blood: Russian Literature from
the 21st Century (2008), and Consultant Editor for Russia, Central
and Eastern Europe at the Times Literary Supplement.
Yuri Buida grew up in the small town of Znamensk in the Kaliningrad
region. This much-disputed territory in former East Prussia was
occupied by Soviet troops in 1945; the German inhabitants were
deported en masse. The Russians among whom Buida was born were
effectively immigrants, and a sense of the transitory courses right
through his cycle of short stories. Deprived of a sense of the
past, the motley Russian dwellers of this 'settlement-town' - war
cripples, bereaved wives, madmen and magicians - inhabit a
dislocated world. Death is all around them, yet Buida animates
their lives with unforgettable vitality and humour, and with a
peculiarly Russian sense of the miraculous. His own prose style, by
turns baroque, magic realist and savagely terse, is a formidable
match for the subject. He fills his intense short stories, often no
longer than half a dozen pages, with a plot around which most
writers would be happy to construct entire novels. The Prussian
Bride is a treasure-house of myth and narrative exuberance, with
stories swing unpredictably between outrageous invention and often
tragic reality. It is one of the most exciting discoveries of
post-Soviet literature and a worthy win
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The Rehearsals (Paperback)
Vladimir Sharov; Translated by Oliver Ready
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R407
R364
Discovery Miles 3 640
Save R43 (11%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Before and During (Paperback)
Vladimir Sharov; Translated by Oliver Ready
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R408
R365
Discovery Miles 3 650
Save R43 (11%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Set in a dementia ward in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet
stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its
dismal setting into a series of fantastical excursions into the
Russian past. We meet Leo Tolstoy's twin brother, eaten by the
great writer in his mother's womb, only to be born as Tolstoy's
'son'; the philosopher-hermit Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that
the common task of humanity was the physical resurrection of their
ancestors; a self-replicating Madame de Stael who, during her
second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass
post-chaise and becomes Fyodorov's lover. (In her third and last
life, she becomes mother and lover to Stalin). Out of these
intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies - all described in a serious,
steady voice - Sharov seeks to retrieves the hidden connections and
hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for
justice, salvation and God. Cover design: Marie Lane. Russian
critics have described Vladimir Sharov's writing as an almagam of
Tolstoy, Doistoievski and Soljenitsyn."
The complete diaries that Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London,
kept between 1932 and 1943 Confiscated by Soviet authorities in the
1950s, the diaries of Ivan Maisky, the USSR's ambassador to Great
Britain from 1932 to 1943, have been unearthed, annotated, and
edited for publication in a three-volume set that Niall Ferguson
predicts "will stand as one of the great achievements of
twenty-first century historical scholarship." Maisky's revelations
illuminate Soviet foreign policy in the years prior to and during
World War II, providing fascinating perspectives on London's
political life and climate, key figures and events, and the Kremlin
rivalries that influenced Soviet policy. Volume 1: The Rise of
Hitler and the Gathering Clouds of War, 1932-1938 Volume 2: The
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the Battle of Britain, 1939-1940 Volume
3: The German Invasion of Russia and the Forging of the Grand
Alliance, 1941-19
The theme of foolishness has long occupied an unusually prominent
place in Russian culture, touching on key questions of national,
spiritual, and intellectual identity. In literature, the figure of
the fool - and the voice of the fool - has carried additional
appeal as an enduring source of comic and stylistic innovation.
Never has this appeal been stronger than in the past half-century,
whether as a reaction to the "scientific atheism" and official
culture of the late-socialist era, or as a response to the
intellectual and moral disorientation that accompanied the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Persisting in Folly traces three contrasting
phases within this period: the "praise of folly" that underpins
acknowledged samizdat masterpieces by Venedikt Erofeev, Yuz
Aleshkovsky, and Sasha Sokolov; the sceptical appraisals of the
Russian cult of the fool offered in the 1980s by Viktor Erofeev and
Dmitry Galkovsky; and the legacy of this conflicted tradition in
post-Soviet prose. By combining close readings with a rich
comparative and contextual framework, this book charts a new path
through recent Russian literature and offers a wide-ranging
consideration of the causes and consequences of Russian writers'
enduring quest for wisdom through folly.
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