From Horrors to Hope When Russian readers pick up Penthouse instead of The Gulag Archipelago and TV viewers turn on Dallas instead of Solzhenitsyn’s talking-head program, a sad irony is on display.
November 01, 1997 A Prophet and His Country Thirty-five years ago this month, a little book was published that changed Russia forever. On the anniversary of the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, we asked two esteemed observers to offer their views on the great writer's legacy.
October 01, 1999 Crime & Punishment: Russia's Prison System Russia's prison system houses more prisoners per capita than any other nation on Earth. And the system's problems are as old and pernicious as when it was founded 120 years ago.
March 01, 1997 In Search of the Russian Idea A review of Resurrection, by David Remnick, and The Agony of the Russian Idea, by Tim McDaniel, and a consideration of Russia's attempt to define and embrace a new National Idea.
September 01, 2008 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Reclusive, frank, astoundingly industrious and uncompromising, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the most influential writer of his age, and he did more to topple the Soviet Union than any other individual in the 20th century. We spoke with his wife just a few months before his death.
July 01, 2016 When a Book is More Than a Book 2016 is the fortieth anniversary of the release of Hedrick Smith’s pathbreaking book, The Russians, the first book to truly take readers behind the Iron Curtain and into the everyday lives of Russians.
January 01, 2009 The Evil That Runs Through Men's Hearts Five new books that touch, in various ways, on the evil chapters of Soviet and Russian history over the last 100 or so years.
September 01, 2008 One Century in the Life of Aleksandr Isayevich A nostalgic look back on the life of Solzhenitsyn, and how it affected one Russian writer.
Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography This astonishingly gripping autobiography by the founder of the Russian Women’s Death Battallion in World War I is an eye-opening documentary of life before, during and after the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas This exciting new trilogy by a Russian author – who has been compared to Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco – vividly recreates a lost world, yet its passions and characters are entirely relevant to the present day. Full of mystery, memorable characters, and non-stop adventure, The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas is a must read for lovers of historical fiction and international thrillers.
Murder at the Dacha Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.
Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices Stargorod is a mid-sized provincial city that exists only in Russian metaphorical space. It has its roots in Gogol, and Ilf and Petrov, and is a place far from Moscow, but close to Russian hearts. It is a place of mystery and normality, of provincial innocence and Black Earth wisdom. Strange, inexplicable things happen in Stargorod. So do good things. And bad things. A lot like life everywhere, one might say. Only with a heavy dose of vodka, longing and mystery.
White Magic The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction For over 100 years, most of the science fiction produced by the world’s largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection changes that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit.
Marooned in Moscow This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia The very word Siberia evokes a history and reputation as awesome as it is enthralling. In this acclaimed book on Russia’s conquest of its eastern realms, Benson Bobrick offers a story that is both rich and subtle, broad and deep.
Okudzhava Bilingual Poems, songs and autobiographical sketches by Bulat Okudzhava, the king of the Russian bards.
A Taste of Chekhov This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
Bears in the Caviar Bears in the Caviar is a hilarious and insightful memoir by a diplomat who was “present at the creation” of US-Soviet relations. Charles Thayer headed off to Russia in 1933, calculating that if he could just learn Russian and be on the spot when the US and USSR established relations, he could make himself indispensable and start a career in the foreign service. Remarkably, he pulled it of.
Far & Away ~ Tales from Rural Russia 33 original stories about modern (and not so modern) life in rural Russia.
