Download or read book Kolyma Tales written by Varlan Shalamov and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1994-07-28 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.
Download or read book Condensed Milk written by Varlam Shalamov and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrated in the first person, this short story is one episode in the life of a Russian labour-camp inmate. Written by Varlam Shalamov after his own experiences at a gulag, it describes the apathy of prisoners as they steadily approach death, the assuredness of betrayal and duplicity, and the constant craving for material satisfaction to lessen the empty, scorched feeling inside. When an old acquaintance lays out an escape plan, that satisfaction is offered in the form of condensed milk: a sweet, delicious extravagance - a small element of joy in the midst of impending death.
Download or read book GRAPHITE written by A S J Wells and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lives of seemingly ordinary people intertwine in GRAPHITE, a modern contemporary saga, when a man saves the life of a toddler. Whilst waiting for the bus, Maurice meets and chats with Arnold, a bin man. He decides to walk home and ends up saving toddler, Charlie, from being hit by a car. He is accused of attempted kidnap and is sent to prison. Terry, his lawyer, looks for the driver, but his investigation gets complicated, involving the Met police and an International Crime Organisation led by Masood. Sean, a priest, is forced on sabbatical for his outcry during Maurice’s arrest. He travels to Malaga and befriends Miguel, a gay man. In hospital he falls in love with Maria, a nurse. Will love or the church decide his future? Birdie, a Met Sergeant, known as the Ice Maiden, and Ivor, a Met detective and flirt, help Terry seek the car driver and a mole in their office. She visits her brother, Terry’s assistant, and is attacked by local thug. GRAPHITE is a gripping crime and psychological duology with humour that will keep readers hooked until the very end.
Download or read book Sofia Petrovna written by Лидия Корнеевна Чуковская and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves. Sofia Petrovna offers a rare and vital record of Stalin's Great Purges.
Download or read book Kolyma Diaries written by Jacek Hugo-Bader and published by Portobello Books. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world's last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his 'fellow travellers', the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia
Download or read book The Stories of J F Powers written by J.F. Powers and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by Frank O’Connor as one of “the greatest living storytellers,” J. F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver among the authors who have given the short story an unmistakably American cast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories, published over a period of some thirty years and brought together here in a single volume for the first time, Powers wrote about many things: baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression, and the flight to the suburbs. His greatest subject, however—and one that was uniquely his—was the life of priests in Chicago and the Midwest. Powers’s thoroughly human priests, who include do-gooders, gladhanders, wheeler-dealers, petty tyrants, and even the odd saint, struggle to keep up with the Joneses in a country unabashedly devoted to consumption. These beautifully written, deeply sympathetic, and very funny stories are an unforgettable record of the precarious balancing act that is American life.
Download or read book Everything Flows written by Vasily Grossman and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Review Books Original Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many. Thus we also hear about Ivan’s cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, and Pinegin, the informer who got Ivan sent to the camps. Then a brilliant short play interrupts the narrative: a series of informers steps forward, each making excuses for the inexcusable things that he did—inexcusable and yet, the informers plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable. And at the core of the book, we find the story of Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan’s lover, who tells about her eager involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932–33, which led to the deaths of three to five million Ukrainian peasants. Here Everything Flows attains an unbearable lucidity comparable to the last cantos of Dante’s Inferno.
Download or read book Stalin s Slave Ships written by Martin J. Bollinger and published by US Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book documents the often horrific stories of the Gulag fleet and its passengers and reveals the unwitting role of the U. S. government in the operation. U.S. shipyards built most of the Gulag fleet and later overhauled many ships free of charge. Bollinger details this tragic saga of forced relocation using firsthand testimony from those involved in the operation and materials from both American and Russian archives. His examination of how much Washington knew about the use of American ships to transport slave laborers adds valuable information to the record of the Soviet Union under Stalin."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Lost Pianos of Siberia written by Sophy Roberts and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “melodious” mix of music, history, and travelogue “reveals a story inextricably linked to the drama of Russia itself . . . These pages sing like a symphony.” —The Wall Street Journal Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies, and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos—grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos traveled into this snowbound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers, and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle. The Lost Pianos of Siberia follows Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful—and peppered with pianos. “An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book.” —Paul Theroux
Download or read book Calligraphy Lesson written by Mikhail Shishkin and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-27 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language collection of short stories by Russia's greatest contemporary author, Mikhail Shishkin, the only author to win all three of Russia's most prestigious literary awards. Often included in discussions of Nobel Prize contenders, Shishkin is a master prose writer in the breathtakingly beautiful style of the greatest Russian authors, known for complex, allusive novels about universal and emotional themes. Shishkin's stories read like modern versions of the eternal literature written by his greatest inspirations: Boris Pasternak, Ivan Bunin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Shishkin's short fiction is the perfect introduction to his breathtaking oeuvre, his stories touch on the same big themes as his novels, spanning discussions of love and loss, death and eternal life, emigration and exile. Calligraphy Lesson spans Shishkin's entire writing career, including his first published story, the 1993 Debut Prize–winning "Calligraphy Lesson," and his most recent story "Nabokov's Inkblot," which was written for a dramatic adaptation performed in Zurich in 2013. Mikhail Shishkin (b. 1961 in Moscow) is one of the most prominent names in contemporary Russian literature. A former interpreter for refugees in Switzerland, Shishkin divides his time between Moscow, Switzerland, and Germany.
Download or read book A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia written by Alexander N. Yakovlev and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He unhesitatingly names those individuals who bear responsibility for these catastrophic deaths, bringing into sharper focus than ever before the facts, the perpetrators, and the events of the Soviet Union's years of terror."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Road written by Vasiliĭ Semenovich Grossman and published by NYRB Classics. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Children of the Gulag written by Cathy A. Frierson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive documentary history of children whose parents were identified as enemies of the Soviet regime, from its inception through Joesph Stalin's death. With top-secret documents in translation from the Russian state archives, memoirs, and interviews with child survivors
Download or read book Fowling Piece written by Heidy Steidlmayer and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Winner, 2012 John C. Zacharias First Book Award for best debut book by a Ploughshares writer A remarkably mature first collection of poems, Heidy Steidlmayer’s Fowling Piece is the debut of a highly original voice. As they search for meaning in both the extraordinary and the everyday, these poems, in exquisitely compressed language, display a fierce attention to the history of individual words and a surprising wit. In Steidlmayer's poetic landscape, words strike the reader as at once familiar and exotic, becoming instruments through which she is able to access and make sense of the most profound, irreducible aspects of human experience. Her mastery of and experiments in form are exceptional for a poet of any age. Fowling Piece offers the rare gift of a new poet whose work is truly new.
Download or read book Painted Black written by Debra R. Borys and published by New Libri Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Robert Young, Cry for short, told himself he went with Lexie to keep her safe, that it had nothing to do with his struggle to avoid hustling along the harbor like Moon and the others. Selling blow jobs for forty bucks, however, pales in comparison to what he finds in Cole's apartment above the funeral home. And even a hungry kid will only go so far to fill his stomach. In the ensuing struggle, Chris escapes but Lexie does not and that fact still haunts him.
Download or read book Shock Therapy written by Varlam Shalamov and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merzlakov, once a robust stable-hand, now fights hunger, pain and exhaustion after a year and a half at a labour camp. An enormous man given little food, he sees the larger men dying first, their bodies conquered by starvation. In his desperation for survival, he begins a yearlong struggle of pain and injury. It ends with the inscrutable and punctilious Dr Peter Ivanovich. In a curious mix of empathy and haunting objectivity, this short story describes a snapshot of life in a Russian labour-camp. Written after Varlam Shalamov's own experiences at a gulag, it is one episode in the many that make up Kolyma Tales.
Download or read book The Gulag in Writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers an account of the two most famous authors of the Gulag: Varlam Shalamov and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
