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Northwestern University Press
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Leo Tolstoy undertook the writing of the stories in Divine and Human and Other Stories around the time of the 1905 revolution in Russia. While doing so, he drew on the tragic past of Russia and its empire to comment on the issues and ideas of the day. Tolstoy had long before taken on the mantle of sage, and in addition to his treatises and essays on religious and social topics, he continued to write many works of fiction. The stories Divine and Human, Berries, and What For? are collected together here for the first time, and they show the depth of — and contradictions in — Tolstoy's thought as he tried to reconcile his harsh religious beliefs with humanistic appeals for justice. Taken as a whole the collection is a revealing look at the irreconcilable life and thought of a literary giant. |
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One of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was a Futurist, early Bolshevik, and champion of the avant garde. An early revolutionary, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet society, and three of his plays — all of which were banned until after Stalin's death — reflect his changing assessments of the Revolution. They are collected here with his first, more personal work, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. This volume includes Mystery Bouffe, a mock medieval mystery play written in 1918 to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution; The Bathhouse, a sharp attack on Soviet bureaucracy subtitled a drama of circus and fireworks; and The Bedbug, in which a worker with bourgeois pretensions is frozen and resurrected fifty years later, when the world has been transformed into a material paradise. Mayakovsky's first play, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, reveals the poet's propensity for painful self-dramatization and his flair for grotesque imagery. Fresh, inventive, and shot through with zany humor, Mayakovsky's plays represent a radically new kind of theater. |
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A satirical novel of alcohol, politics, Soviet society, and love. The story of a cable fitter who is fired from his job for charting his co-workers' jobs against the amount of alcohol they have consumed. |
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Boris Pasternak is best known in the West for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, whereas in Russia he is most celebrated as a poet. The two poetry collections offered here in translation are chronological and thematic bookends, and they capture Pasternak's abiding and powerful vision of life: his sense of its beauty and terror, its precariousness for the individual, and its persistence in time — that vitality of being with which he is on familiar and familial terms. In the early work My Sister Life, which commemorates the year 1917, Pasternak, then in his late twenties, found his poetic voice. The book would go on to become one of the most influential collections of Rus-sian poetry of the twentieth century. The Poems of Yury Zhivago are a part of the poet's famous novel, Dr. Zhivago, whose title might be rendered in English as Doctor Life. These later lyrics are a kind of summing up that reflect, from the perspective of age and approaching death, upon the accumulated experience of a contemplative life amid turbulent and terrifying times.Falen's fresh new translations of these poems capture their expres-sion of the beauty and the joy, the terror and the pain, of what it is to be alive... and to die. |
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Includes many famous poems well known to, and often memorized by, every educated Russian, as well as lighter, more occasional pieces. This title presents a collection of 167 of Pushkin's lyrics arranged chronologically, beginning with verse written in the poet's teenage years and closing with lines composed shortly before his death. |
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Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant and passes the war peacefully tending the village postmistress's garden. Just after the German invasion, the secret police discover this mysterious soldier lurking behind the front line. Their pursuit of Chonkin and his determined resistance lead to wild skirmishes and slapstick encounters.Vladimir Voinovich's hilarious satire ridicules everything that was sacred in the Soviet Union, from agricultural reform to the Red Army to Stalin, in a refreshing combination of dissident conscience and universal humor. |
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Valentine Kataev's Time, Forward! is a classic of Soviet Realism. Written in 1932, the novel captures the enthusiasm and the optimism of the First Five-Year Plan in its portrayal of the construction of Magnitogorsk, and enormous metallurgical plant considered one of the finest industrial achievements of the period. |
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Russian Nights, Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky's major work, is of great importance in Russian intellectual history. This captivating novel is the summation of Odoevsky's views and interests in many fields: Gothic literature, romanticism, mysticism, the occult, social responsibility, Westernization, utopia and anti-utopia. Compared variously to The Decameron, to Hoffman's Serapion Brethren, and the Platonic dialogues, Russian Nights is a mixture of genres — a series of romantic and society tales framed by Odoevsky's musings on the main strands of Russian thought of the 1820s and 1830s. This is a unique work of Russian literature, and a key sourcebook for Russian romanticism and Russian social and aesthetic thought of its epoch. |
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A fine example of Village Prose from the post-Stalin era, Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of the Russian peasant culture to the impersonal, soulless march of progress. It is the final summer of the peasant village of Matyora. A dam will be completed in the fall, destroying the village. Although their departure is inevitable, the characters over when, and even whether, they should leave. A haunting story with a heartfelt theme, Farewell to Matyora is a passionate plea for humanity and an eloquent cry for a return to an organic life. |
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Vsevolod Ivanov was praised in the 1920s as one of the most original and promising young writers to emerge from the Russian Revolution. Ivanov's personal experiences in Siberia and Central Asia during the Revolution and Civil War, set against a childhood and youth spent wandering through that vast expanse and nourishing his imagination on such Romantic writers as Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, infuse his writing. Combining traditional elements with the fantastic and the surreal, Ivanov's stories address not only the themes of the Revolution — the dehumanizing effects of famine; the ferment, energy, and uncertainty of the tempestuous times — but also the quotidian: the quiet world of man and nature, and the elemental bond that tied peasants to their native land. |
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These translations of Gogol's plays restore the vitality of Gogol's language and humour, finally allowing his dramatic art to speak directly to Western readers, directors, actors and theatre-goers. This volume contains The Government Inspector and Marriage — Gogol's greatest full-length plays — and a one-act satire, The Gamblers. Also included are writings on theatre from Gogol's notebooks and correspondences, as well as an appendix and extensive introduction. |
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