The writer whom Vasily Grossman loved most of all was Anton Chekhov. Grossman’s own short stories are no less accomplished than his novels, and they are remarkably varied. “The Dog” is about the first living creature to be sent into space and then returned to Earth. “The Road,” an account of the war from a mule in an Italian artillery regiment, can be read as a 4,000-word distillation of Life and Fate. “Mother” is based on a true story about an orphaned girl who was adopted by Nikolay Yezhov (head of the NKVD at the height of the Great Terror) and his wife; it includes brief portraits of Stalin and several important Soviet writers and politicians—all of them as seen through the eyes of the little girl or of her honest but uncomprehending peasant nanny. As well as a dozen stories—from “In the Town of Berdichev” (Grossman’s first published success) to “In Kislovodsk” (the last story he wrote)—this volume includes an unusual article about the life of a Moscow cemetery. It also contains two letters Grossman wrote to his mother, after her death at the hands of the Nazis, and the complete text of “The Hell of Treblinka,” one of the very first, and still among the most powerful, accounts of a Nazi death camp.

The 1980s witnessed the ascendency of Russian women in multiple spheres of artistic creation, including literature, film, and painting. This volume may thus be said to engage not only women's artistic production but, indeed, the best and most colourful of recent Russian culture. Treating contemporary Russian women's creativity, it approaches women's texts, films, and canvasses from a range of perspectives, from anti-gendered to feminist. Some of the essays introduce writers not previously well studied, others challenge conventional interpretations and assumptions, while still others yield original viewpoints through novel juxtapositions. In addition to offering insights into the various artists under analysis, the essays map the wide terrain of issues and methodologies proliferating in cultural criticism today, and mirror the diversity that is one of the most appealing features of women's creativity in contemporary Russia.

"Some of the most important literary theory of this century."--College English Russian formalists emerged from the Russian Revolution with ideas about the independence of literature. They enjoyed that independence until Stalin shut them down. By then they had produced essays that remain among the best defenses ever written for both literature and its theory. Included here are four essays representing key points in the formalists' short history. Victor Scklovsky's pathbreaking "Art as Technique" (1917) vindicates disorder in literary style. His 1921 essay on Tristram Shandy makes that eccentric novel the centerpiece for a theory of narrative. A section from Tomashevsky's "Thematics" (1925) inventories the elements of stories. In "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (1927) Boris Eichenbaum defends Russian formalism from many attacks. An able champion, he describes formalism's evolution, notes its major workers and works, clears away decayed axioms, and rescues literature from "primitive historicism" and other dangers. These essays set a course for literary studies that led to Prague structuralism, French semiotics, and postmodern poetics. Russian Formalist Criticism has been honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association.

This book is intended to capture the interest of anyone who has been attracted to Russian culture through the greats of Russian literature, either through the texts themselves, or encountering them in the cinema, or opera. Rather than a conventional chronology of Russian literature, the book will explore the place and importance of literature of all sorts in Russian culture. How and when did a Russian national literature come into being? What shaped its creation? How have the Russians regarded their literary language? The book will uses the figure of Pushkin, 'the Russian Shakespeare' as a recurring example as his work influenced every Russian writer who came after hime, whether poets or novelists. It will look at such questions as why Russian writers are venerated, how they've been interpreted inside Russia and beyond, and the influences of such things as the folk tale tradition, orthodox religion, and the West ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”—Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

This collection of texts by writers, historians, philosophers, political analysts, and opinion leaders combines reflections on Ukrainian history and analyses of the present with outlines of conceptual ideas and life stories. The authors present a multi-faceted image of Ukraine’s memory and reality touching upon topics from the Holodomor to Maidan, from the Russian aggression to cultural diversity, from the depth of the past to the complexity of the present. The contributors include Ola Hnatiuk, Irena Karpa, Haska Shyyan, Larysa Denysenko, Hanna Shelest, Andriy Kulakov, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Serhii Plokhy, Yuri Andrukhovych, Andriy Kurkov, Andrij Bondar, Vakhtang Kebuladze, Volodymyr Rafeenko, Alim Aliev, Leonid Finberg, and Andriy Portnov. The book was initially published by Internews Ukraine and UkraineWorld with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

This book offers new perspectives on the environmental history of lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to 'place' and 'nature' in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. Through case studies of specific places in northwestern Russia, for example the Solovetskie Islands, the Urals, Siberia, in particular Lake Baikal, and the Russian Far East, the book highlights the importance of local environments and the specificities of individual places and spaces in understanding the human-nature nexus. This focus is accentuated by the fact that the authors have considerable, first-hand experience of the places they write about that complements and supplements their research in textual sources.

Short stories have long been regarded as a potent form of writing. Concentrated and distilled yet engaging the reader at a pace that commands attention in the pages it occupies. Narrative and characters are still fully fleshed and the story is no longer, or shorter, than it absolutely must. Handed down from the oral tradition they have been variously regarded as 'apprentice pieces' written by authors on their way to becoming better writers as well as fodder for innumerable periodicals over the decades for those who liked their reading in more succinct chunks or perhaps with a 'cliffhanger ending' to keep the interest until the next exciting instalment. Today they are regarded as works in their own right and, in the pens of the most highly skilled, to be greatly admired. The Russians of course have produced some of the very greatest writers and some of the best - and longest - novels. In this series we take the very best of those Russian Short stories and present them here.

This book is a collection of Nineteen selected stories by the renowned Russian authors. The most of the 27 illustrations are the pictures of the Greek and Roman Goddesses worshiped before the influence of Christianity and monotheism. The authors and the stories are:The Queen Of Spades - By Alexsandr S. Pushkin; The Cloak - By Nikolay V. Gogol; The District Doctor - By Ivan S. Turgenev; The Christmas Tree And The Wedding - By Fiodor M. Dostoyevsky; God Sees The Truth, But Waits - By Leon. Tolstoy; How A Muzhik Fed Two Officials - By M.Y. Saltykov [N. Shchedrin]; Banquet Given By The Mayor, The Shades and A Phantasy - By Vladimir G. Korlenko; The Signal - By Vsevolod M. Garshin; The Darling, The Bet and Vanka - By Anton P. Chekhov; Hide And Seek - By Fiodor Sologub; Dethroned - By I.N. Potapenko; The Servant - By S.T. Semyonov; One Autumn Night - By Maxim Gorky; The Revolutionist - By Michaïl P. Artzybashev; The Outrage : A True Story - By Aleksandr I. Kuprin. Beat regards.Asino Calcio