Download or read book Dancing with Stalin written by Christina Ezrahi and published by . This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nina Anisimova was born in 1909 in imperial St Petersburg. One of the most renowned character dancers of the Stalinist period, she won her way into the hearts of her audience over many decades. Yet few knew that her exemplary career was a fragile construct built atop a dark secret. In 1938, at the height of the Great Terror, Nina vanished. Only a handful of people knew that this famous dancer had not only been arrested by Secret Police, accused of being a Nazi Spy, but sentenced to forced labour in a camp in Kazakhstan. There, her art would become a salvation, giving her a reason to fight for her life when she found herself without winter clothes in temperatures of minus 40 degrees. Over the coming weeks, Nina's husband, Kostia Derzhavin, began to piece together what had happened to his wife. What he decided to do next was almost without precedent - to take on the ruthless Soviet state to prove her innocence. He would put himself in danger to save the woman he loved. Dancing for Stalin is a remarkable true story of suffering and injustice, of courage, resilience and love.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity written by Anthony Shay and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 1307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dance intersects with ethnicity in a powerful variety of ways and at a broad set of venues. Dance practices and attitudes about ethnicity have sometimes been the source of outright discord, as when African Americans were - and sometimes still are - told that their bodies are 'not right' for ballet, when Anglo Americans painted their faces black to perform in minstrel shows, when 19th century Christian missionaries banned the performance of particular native dance traditions throughout much of Polynesia, and when the Spanish conquistadors and church officials banned sacred Aztec dance rituals. More recently, dance performances became a locus of ethnic disunity in the former Yugoslavia as the Serbs of Bosnia attended dance concerts but only applauded for the Serbian dances, presaging the violent disintegration of that failed state. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. Newly-commissioned for the volume, the chapters of the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical moments and associated lived identities. In bringing modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the chapters ask the reader to contemplate previous categories of folk, ethnic, classical, and modern. From this standpoint, the book considers how dance maintains, challenges, resists or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior categories. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity. Dance and ethnicity is an increasingly active area of scholarly inquiry in dance studies and ethnomusicology alike and the need is great for serious scholarship to shape the contours of these debates. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity provides an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research from leading experts which will set the tone for future scholarly conversation.

Download or read book Russian Dance written by Andrée Aelion Brooks and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2004-05-24 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of Helene Rubinoff, a Russian refugee in Jazz Age New York who forsook her comfortable life with her impresario husband and his celebrity salons, and her beloved daughter, to follow her lover back to an uncertain fate in 1930s Russia.

Download or read book Dancing on Bones written by Katie Stallard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dancing on Bones is the story of how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule.History didn't end. Democracy didn't triumph. America's leading role in the world is no longer assured. Instead, authoritarian rule is on the rise, and the global order established after 1945 is under attack. This is the phenomenon Katie Stallard tackles in Dancing on Bones, probing the version ofhistory that leaders in China, Russia, and North Korea teach their citizens.These three states consistently top the list of threats to the global order and US national security. All are governed by autocratic regimes. All have nuclear weapons and believe that the era of American hegemony is fading. All three share a sense of historical grievance, rooted in the wars of thelast century - specifically World War II and the Korean War - that their leaders exploit to shore up popular support at home and fuel increasingly aggressive foreign policy. Decades after the real guns fell silent, these wars rage on in China, Russia, and North Korea, reimagined in popular media,public memorials, and patriotic education campaigns. This is not history as it was, but as the current rulers need it to be. Since coming to power in China, Xi Jinping has almost doubled the length of the war with Japan, Vladimir Putin has brought back bombastic military parades through Red Square,and Kim Jong Un has invested vast sums in rebuilding war museums in his impoverished state, while historians who try to challenge the official line are silenced and jailed. But this didn't start with the current leaders and it won't end with them.Drawing on first-hand, on-the-ground reporting, Dancing on Bones is the story of how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule. If we want to understand where these three nuclear powers are heading, we mustunderstand the stories they are telling their citizens about the past.

Download or read book Like a Bomb Going Off written by Janice Ross and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone has heard of George Balanchine. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine's contemporary, who remained in Lenin's Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary dances that spoke to the Soviet condition. His work was often considered so culturally explosive that it was described as like a bomb going off.” Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson's work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this illuminating and beautifully written biography brings to life a hidden history of artistic resistance in the USSR through this brave artist, who struggled against officially sanctioned anti-Semitism while offering a vista of hope.

Download or read book Dancing Under the Red Star written by Karl Tobien and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2006-06-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shocking and inspirational saga of Margaret Werner and her miraculous survival in the Siberian death camps of Stalinist Russia. Between 1930 and 1932, Henry Ford sent 450 of his Detroit employees plus their families to live in Gorky, Russia, to operate a new manufacturing facility. This is the true story of one of those families–Carl and Elisabeth Werner and their young daughter Margaret–and their terrifying life in Russia under brutal dictator Joseph Stalin. Margaret was seventeen when her father was arrested on trumped-up charges of treason. Heartbroken and afraid, she and her mother were left to withstand the hardships of life under the oppressive Soviet state, an existence marked by poverty, starvation, and fear. Refusing to comply with the Socialist agenda, Margaret was ultimately sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Stalin’s Gulag. Filth, malnutrition, and despair accompanied merciless physical labor. Yet in the midst of inhumane conditions came glimpses of hope and love as Margaret came to realize her dependence upon “the grace, favor, and protection of an unseen God.” In all, it would be thirty long years before Margaret returned to kiss the ground of home. Of all the Americans who made this virtually unknown journey–ultimately spending years in Siberian death camps–Margaret Werner was the only woman who lived to tell about it. Written by her son, Karl Tobien, Dancing Under the Red Star is Margaret’s unforgettable true story: an inspiring chronicle of faith, defiance, and personal triumph

Download or read book The View from Stalin s Head written by Aaron Hamburger and published by Random House. This book was released on 2004-03-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten stories in The View from Stalin’s Head unfold in the post–Cold War Prague of the 1990s—a magnet not only for artists and writers but also for American tourists and college grad deadbeats, a city with a glorious yet sometimes shameful history, its citizens both resentful of and nostalgic for their Communist past. Against this backdrop, Aaron Hamburger conjures an arresting array of characters: a self-appointed rabbi who runs a synagogue for non-Jews; an artist, once branded as a criminal by the Communist regime, who hires a teenage boy to boss him around; a fiery would-be socialist trying to rouse the oppressed masses while feeling the tug of her comfortable Stateside upbringing. European and American, Jewish and gentile, straight and gay, the people in these stories are forced to confront themselves when the ethnic, religious, political, and sexual labels they used to rely on prove surprisingly less stable than they’d imagined. As Christopher Isherwood did in his Berlin Stories, Aaron Hamburger offers a humane and subtly etched portrait of a time and place, of people wrestling with questions of love, faith, and identity. The View from Stalin’s Head is a remarkable debut, and the beginning of a remarkable career.

Download or read book Bolshoi Confidential Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today written by Simon Morrison and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “incredibly rich” (New York Times) definitive history of the Bolshoi Ballet, visionary performances onstage compete with political machinations backstage. A critical triumph, Simon Morrison’s “sweeping and authoritative” (Guardian) work, Bolshoi Confidential, details the Bolshoi Ballet’s magnificent history from its earliest tumults to recent scandals. On January 17, 2013, a hooded assailant hurled acid into the face of the artistic director, making international headlines. A lead soloist, enraged by institutional power struggles, later confessed to masterminding the crime. Morrison gives the shocking violence context, describing the ballet as a crucible of art and politics beginning with the disreputable inception of the theater in 1776, through the era of imperial rule, the chaos of revolution, the oppressive Soviet years, and the Bolshoi’s recent $680 million renovation. With vibrant detail including “sex scandals, double-suicide pacts, bribery, arson, executions, prostitution rings, embezzlement, starving orphans, [and] dead cats in lieu of flowers” (New Republic), Morrison makes clear that the history of the Bolshoi Ballet mirrors that of Russia itself.

Download or read book Alla Osipenko written by Joel Lobenthal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alla Osipenko is the gripping story of one of history's greatest ballerinas, a courageous rebel who paid the price for speaking truth to the Soviet state. A cast of characters drawn from all sectors of Soviet and post-Perestroika society makes this biography as encyclopedic and encompassing as a great Russian novel.

Download or read book When Pigs Could Fly and Bears Could Dance written by Miriam Neirick and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2012-09-21 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than seven decades the circuses enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Soviet Union. How did the circus—an institution that dethroned figures of authority and refused any orderly narrative structure—become such a cultural mainstay in a state known for blunt and didactic messages? Miriam Neirick argues that the variety, flexibility, and indeterminacy of the modern circus accounted for its appeal not only to diverse viewers but also to the Soviet state. In a society where government-legitimating myths underwent periodic revision, the circus proved a supple medium of communication. Between 1919 and 1991, it variously displayed the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution, the beauty of the new Soviet man and woman, the vulnerability of the enemy during World War II, the prosperity of the postwar Soviet household, and the Soviet mission of international peace—all while entertaining the public with the acrobats, elephants, and clowns. With its unique ability to meet and reconcile the demands of both state and society, the Soviet circus became the unlikely darling of Soviet culture and an entertainment whose usefulness and popularity stemmed from its ambiguity.

Download or read book American Girls in Red Russia written by Julia L. Mickenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.

Download or read book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters written by Jason Stearns and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "meticulously researched and comprehensive" (Financial Times​) history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa's Congo, with first-hand accounts of the continent's worst conflict in modern times. At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling and deeply-reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, and highlights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power, as well as the moral decisions with which the war confronted them. Now updated with a new introduction, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tells the full story of Africa's Great War.

Download or read book Dancing in Odessa written by Ilya Kaminsky and published by Tupelo Press. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the prestigious Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, selected by poet and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Eleanor Wilner who says, "I'm so happy to have a manuscript that I believe in so powerfully, poetry with such a deep music. I love it." One might spend a lifetime reading books by emerging poets without finding the real thing, the writer who (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) can take the top of your head off. Kaminsky is the real thing. Impossibly young, this Russian immigrant makes the English language sing with the sheer force of his music, a wondrous irony, as Ilya Kaminsky has been deaf since the age of four. In Odessa itself, "A city famous for its drunk tailors, huge gravestones of rabbis, horse owners and horse thieves, and most of all, for its stuffed and baked fish," Kaminksy dances with the strangest — and the most recognizable — of our bedfellows in a distinctive and utterly brilliant language, a language so particular and deft that it transcends all of our expectations, and is by turns luminous and universal.

Download or read book Iconography of Power written by Victoria E. Bonnell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-02-05 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masters at visual propaganda, the Bolsheviks produced thousands of vivid and compelling posters after they seized power in October 1917. Intended for a semi-literate population that was accustomed to the rich visual legacy of the Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church, political posters came to occupy a central place in the regime's effort to imprint itself on the hearts and minds of the people and to remold them into the new Soviet women and men. In this first sociological study of Soviet political posters, Victoria Bonnell analyzes the shifts that took place in the images, messages, styles, and functions of political art from 1917 to 1953. Everyone who lived in Russia after the October revolution had some familiarity with stock images of the male worker, the great communist leaders, the collective farm woman, the capitalist, and others. These were the new icons' standardized images that depicted Bolshevik heroes and their adversaries in accordance with a fixed pattern. Like other "invented traditions" of the modern age, iconographic images in propaganda art were relentlessly repeated, bringing together Bolshevik ideology and traditional mythologies of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Symbols and emblems featured in Soviet posters of the Civil War and the 1920s gave visual meaning to the Bolshevik worldview dominated by the concept of class. Beginning in the 1930s, visual propaganda became more prescriptive, providing models for the appearance, demeanor, and conduct of the new social types, both positive and negative. Political art also conveyed important messages about the sacred center of the regime which evolved during the 1930s from the celebration of the heroic proletariat to the deification of Stalin. Treating propaganda images as part of a particular visual language, Bonnell shows how people "read" them—relying on their habits of seeing and interpreting folk, religious, commercial, and political art (both before and after 1917) as well as the fine art traditions of Russia and the West. Drawing on monumental sculpture and holiday displays as well as posters, the study traces the way Soviet propaganda art shaped the mentality of the Russian people (the legacy is present even today) and was itself shaped by popular attitudes and assumptions. Iconography of Power includes posters dating from the final decades of the old regime to the death of Stalin, located by the author in Russian, American, and English libraries and archives. One hundred exceptionally striking posters are reproduced in the book, many of them never before published. Bonnell places these posters in a historical context and provides a provocative account of the evolution of the visual discourse on power in Soviet Russia.

Download or read book Dancing on Thin Ice written by Arkady Polishchuk and published by Doppelhouse Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exiled Russian journalist colorfully narrates his passage into dissent and his work on behalf of persecuted Christians in 1970s USSR.

Download or read book Dressed for a Dance in the Snow written by Monika Zgustova and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poignant, inspirational account of women’s suffering and resilience in Stalin’s forced labor camps—diligently transcribed in the kitchens and living rooms of 9 survivors. “A worthy addition to the literature of the gulag that also features intimate glimpses of the author of Doctor Zhivago.” —Kirkus Reviews The pain inflicted by the gulags has cast a long and dark shadow over Soviet-era history. Zgustová’s collection of interviews with former female prisoners not only chronicles the hardships of the camps, but also serves as testament to the power of beauty in face of adversity. Where one would expect to find stories of hopelessness and despair, Zgustová has unearthed tales of the love, art, and friendship that persisted in times of tragedy. Across the Soviet Union, prisoners are said to have composed and memorized thousands of verses. Galya Sanova, born in a Siberian gulag, remembers reading from a hand-stitched copy of Little Red Riding Hood. Irina Emelyanova passed poems to the male prisoner she had grown to love. In this way, the arts lent an air of humanity to the women’s brutal realities. These stories, collected in the vein of Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning oral histories, turn one of the darkest periods of the Soviet era into a song of human perseverance, in a way that reads as an intimate family history. “We see the darkest years of Soviet history illuminated, again and again, by small yet radiant flashes of humanity, of art, of beauty.” —Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov

Download or read book Nureyev written by Julie Kavanagh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rudolf Nureyev, one of the most iconic dancers of the twentieth century, had it all: beauty, genius, charm, passion, and sex appeal. No other dancer of our time has generated the same excitement, for both men and women, on or off the stage. In this superb biography, Julie Kavanagh deftly brings us through the professional and personal milestones of Nureyev's life and career: his education at the Kirov school in Leningrad; his controversial defection from the USSR in 1961; his long-time affair with the Danish dancer Erik Bruhn; his legendary partnership with Margot Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet in London. We see his fiery collaborations with almost all the major living choreographers including Ashton, Balanchine, Robbins, Graham, and Taylor. And we see Nureyev as he reinvigorated the Paris Ballet Opera in the early 1980s before his death from AIDS complications in 1993. Nureyev: The Life is the most intimate, revealing, and dramatic picture we have ever had of this dazzling, complex figure.