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Alma/Oneworld
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«When Sofia Behrs married Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of «War and Peace», husband and wife regularly exchanged diaries covering the years from 1862 to 1910. Sofia's life was not an easy one: she idealized her husband, but was tormented by him; even her many children were not an unmitigated blessing. In the background of her life was one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history: the transition from old feudal Russia to the three revolutions and three major international wars. Yet it is as Sofia Tolstoy's own life story, the study of one woman's private experience, that the diaries are most valuable and moving. They are a testament to a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life and to remain indomitable. It contains a forward by Doris Lessing.» |
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The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs. This is Gogol's humour at its best, where the most irrelevant-seeming details and turns of phrase suddenly take on a bizarre life of their own. The second story, Ivan Krylov's Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather, has an ingenuous narrator praise the nobility and modesty of a landowner whose actions prove him to be otherwise. The final two stories, by the Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, are satirical attacks on the inability of civil servants to cope with real life, and on Russia's autocracy. Together, they represent some of Russia's finest comic writing before the twentieth century. |
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A wide-ranging Russian novel dealing with the ideas of language, power, and national identity, this comic and thought-provoking work has tremendous relevance to the present day In a world a few decades from now, Russia has descended into a farcical civil war. With an extreme right-wing cult in power, racial tensions have divided the country into the Varangians — those who consider themselves to be the original Aryan settlers of Russia — and the Khazars, the liberals and Jews driven out of Moscow by recent events. Morale has reached an all-time low as the brutality and pointlessness of the situation is becoming more and more apparent. What is left of the fighting now revolves around capturing and recapturing Degunino, a seemingly magical village with an abundance of pies, vodka, and accommodating womenfolk. But there is also a third people — timid, itinerant, and on the brink of extinction — who lay claim to Degunino and Russia as their homeland. Against this rich backdrop of events, this story follows the lives of four couples struggling to escape the chaos and stupidity of the war around them: a teenage girl who adopts a homeless man, a poet turned general separated from his lover, a provincial governor in love with one of the natives, and a legendary military commander who is sleeping with the enemy. |
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«McCarthy's debut novel, set in London, takes a clever conceit and pumps it up with vibrant prose to such great effect that the narrative's pointlessness is nearly a nonissue. The unnamed narrator, who suffers memory loss as the result of an accident that «involved something falling from the sky», receives an £8.5 million settlement and uses the money to re-enact, with the help of a «facilitator» he hires, things remembered or imagined. He buys an apartment building to replicate one that has come to him in a vision and then populates it with people hired to re-enact, over and over again, the mundane activities he has seen his imaginary neighbors performing. He stages both ordinary acts (the fixing of a punctured tire) and violent ones (shootings and more), each time repeating the events many times and becoming increasingly detached from reality and fascinated by the scenarios his newfound wealth has allowed him to create — even though he professes he doesn't «want to understand them». McCarthy's evocation of the narrator's absorption in his fantasy world as it cascades out of control is brilliant all the way through the abrupt climax.» |
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The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958, was one of the most important works of fiction to appear in the Italian language in the twentieth century. Between 1925 and 1930, its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, wrote a number of letters to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo in which he describes his travels around Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, Berlin). The letters, here published for the first time, display much of Lampedusa's distinctive style present in his later work; not only the razor sharp introspection, but also a wicked sense of humor, playful in its description of the comedie humaine. United and underpinned by the genre of the novel, Lampedusa's lifetime obsession, some letters also read like excerpts from a Stendhalian travel journal, whilst others are pickwickian adventures populated with comic, exaggerated personalities. |
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Presented as a series of letters between the humble copying-clerk Devushkin and a distant relative of his, the young Varenka, Poor People brings to the fore the underclass of St Petersburg, who live at the margins of society in the most appalling conditions and abject poverty. As Devushkin tries to help Varenka improve her plight by selling anything he can, he is reduced to even more desperate circumstances and seeks refuge in alcohol, looking on helplessly as the object of his impossible love is taken away from him. |
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Written in Sergei Dovlatov's unique voice and unmatched style, The Zone is a satirical novelization of Dovlatov's time as a prison guard for the Soviet Army in the early 1960s. Snapshots of the prison are juxtaposed with the narrator's letters to Igor Markovich of Hermitage Press in which he urges Igor to publish the very book we're reading. As Igor receives portions of the prison camp manuscript, so too does the reader. Arguably Dovlatov's most significant work, The Zone illuminates the twisted absurdity of the life of a prison guard: Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard. Almost any guard deserved a prison term. Full of Dovlatov's trademark dark humor and dry wit, The Zone's narrator is an extension of his author, and the book fittingly begins with the following disclaimer: The names, events, and dates given here are all real. I invented only those details that were not essential. Therefore, any resemblance between the characters in this book and living people is intentional and malicious. And all fictionalizing was unexpected and accidental. What follows is a complex novel that captures two sides of Dovlatov: the writer and the man. |
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Oscar Wilde claimed that Humiliated and Insulted is not at all inferior to the other great masterpieces and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and, above all, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful literary presence in his own right. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which — in concept and execution — affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author. |
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A tale of intrigue, deception, murder and retribution, Boris Godunov charts the rise and fall of an ambitious prince who cannot avoid facing the consequences of his dark past. Based on the historical figure of the nobleman Boris Godunov, who seized power from Ivan the Terrible's successor in sixteenth-century Russia, and partly inspired by Shakespeare's Macbeth, Alexander Pushkin's 1825 play showcases the author's mastery of verse and dramatic form. Also included in this volume are Pushkin's celebrated four Little Tragedies: Mozart and Salieri, The Miserly Knight, The Stone Guest and A Feast During the Plague. |
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In Bulgakov's Diaboliad, the modest and unassuming office clerk Korotkov is summarily sacked for a trifling error from his job at the First Central Depot for the Materials for Matches, and tries to seek out his newly assigned superior Kalsoner, responsible for his dismissal. His quest through the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy takes on the increasingly surreal dimensions of a nightmare. This early satirical story, reminiscent of Gogol and Dostoevsky, was first published in 1924 and incurred the wrath of pro-Soviet critics. Along with the three other stories in this volume which also feature explorations of the absurd and bizarre, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the artistic development of the author of Master and Margarita. |
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A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official's son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task — an ailing, world-weary nobody — seized with the purposelessness of life and a sense of his own impending death, gradually becomes disillusioned with his mission, and decides to embark on a new path which will lead him to tragedy. |
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Russia's literary world is shaken to its foundations when a mysterious gentleman — a professor of black magic — arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre retinue of servants. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil himself, come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of a disbelieving capital. But the Devil's mission quickly becomes entangled with the fate of the Master — a man who has turned his back on his former life and taken refuge in a lunatic asylum — and his past lover, Margarita. |
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In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia, and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with author's notes, extracts from Chekhov's letters to relatives and associates, and photographs. |
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Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter the modern age. This acclaimed collection represents some of Bulgakov's most personal and insightful observations on youth, isolation and progress. |
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The inexperienced and impetuous young nobleman Pyotr Grinyev is sent on military service in a remote fortress, where he falls in love with Masha, Captain Mironov's daughter — but then the ruthless Cossack Pugachev lays siege to the stronghold, setting in motion a tragic train of events. This volume also contains another work by Pushkin on the same theme, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion, which presents an impartial, meticulously researched history of the revolt, and was condemned as being subversive on its publication. Together, these two works provide a fascinating insight into the character of the peasant who tried to overthrow an empress, written with the clarity and insight of Russia's greatest poet. |
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In order to rescue his beloved Lyudmila, who has been abducted by the evil wizard Chernomor, the warrior Ruslan faces an epic and perilous quest, encoutering a multitude of fantastic and terrifying characters along the way. The basis for Glinka's famous opera of the same name, Ruslan and Lyudmila — Pushkin's second longest poetical work — is a dramatic and ingenious retelling of Russian folklore, full of humour and irony. |
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Set in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev during the chaotic winter of 1918 — 19, The White Guard, Bulgakov's first full-length novel, tells the story of a Russian-speaking family trapped in circumstances that threaten to destroy them. As in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the narrative centres on the stark contrast between the cosy domesticity of family life on the one hand, and wide-ranging and destructive historical events on the other. The result is a disturbing, often shocking story, illuminated, however, by shafts of light that testify to people's resilience, humanity, and ability to love in even the most adverse circumstances. |
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In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual pleasures of Goethe's masterpiece. Opening up in front of Vera's eyes is not only the realm of imagination, but also a world of unbridled feelings and tempestuous passions, which can only shatter the comfort and safety of her existence and force her to set off on a journey of spiritual awakening. |
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Ivan Bunin's first published work, The Village is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centering on episodes in the lives of two peasant brothers — characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human — it reveals the pettiness, violence and ignorance of life on the land. |
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