Three comedies and a tragedy by one of Russia's greatest playwrights.

Contemporary of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy and precursor to Chekhov, he was a keen sociological observer, often exposing abuses of power, landing him in trouble with the censors again and again. He wrote 47 original plays and began the tradition of acting today associated with Stanislavsky. Ostrovsky’s plays were written with performance in mind and with a masterful use of colloquial language. To this day they are a much-performed part of the Russian repertory. Â This volume collects four of Ostrovsky’s key plays, each from a different decade—A Profitable Position, An Ardent Heart, Without a Dowry, and Talents and Admirers, and is rounded out by the translator’s introduction, an afterword for each play, an extensive bibliography, and complete list of Ostrovsky’s works.

A greedy widow behaves badly: she sells off pieces of her nephew's land inheritance, and keeps her niece in the household as a servant, refusing to let her marry her suitor. The arrival of the nephew, an actor, along with his fellow traveling colleague help to resolve the crises.

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE WINNER OF THE CORNELIUS RYAN AWARD FINALIST FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR “Fast-paced and excellently written…much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable.” —New York Times “Filled with sparkling prose and deep analysis.” –The Wall Street Journal The breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of optimism around the world, but Russia today is actively involved in subversive information warfare, manipulating the media to destabilize its enemies. How did a country that embraced freedom and market reform 25 years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent once again on confrontation with America? A winner of the Orwell Prize, The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled counter revolution. A highly regarded Moscow correspondent for the Economist, Arkady Ostrovsky comes to this story both as a participant and a foreign correspondent. His knowledge of many of the key players allows him to explain the phenomenon of Valdimir Putin - his rise and astonishing longevity, his use of hybrid warfare and the alarming crescendo of his military interventions. One of Putin's first acts was to reverse Gorbachev's decision to end media censorship and Ostrovsky argues that the Russian media has done more to shape the fate of the country than its politicians. Putin pioneered a new form of demagogic populism --oblivious to facts and aggressively nationalistic - that has now been embraced by Donald Trump.

The papers of the present volume investigate the potential of the metaphor of life as theater for literary, philosophical, juridical and epistemological discourses from the Middle Ages through modernity, and focusing on traditions as manifold as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Latin-American.