Download or read book Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance written by Elizabeth Skomp and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2015-06-11 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya is a best-selling and critically lauded Russian writer who champions the values of liberalism and tolerance and critiques Putin's policies. This is the first English-language book about this important writer, placing her in the shifting landscape of post-Soviet society and culture.
Download or read book Displacement and Post memory in Post Soviet Women s Writing written by Marja Sorvari and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-04-22 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of ‘great history’ whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers’ work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.
Download or read book Material Culture in Russia and the USSR written by Graham H. Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Material Culture in Russia and the USSR comprises some of the most cutting-edge scholarship across anthropology, history and material and cultural studies relating to Russia and the Soviet Union, from Peter the Great to Putin.Material culture in Russia and the USSR holds a particularly important role, as the distinction between private and public spheres has at times developed in radically different ways than in many places in the more commonly studied West. With case studies covering alcohol, fashion, cinema, advertising and photography among other topics, this wide-ranging collection offers an unparalleled survey of material culture in Russia and the USSR and addresses core questions such as: what makes Russian and Soviet material culture distinctive; who produces it; what values it portrays; and how it relates to 'high culture' and consumer culture.
Download or read book The Russian Medical Humanities written by Melissa L. Miller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in English, The Russian Medical Humanities: Past and Present argues that the medical humanities is a vibrant and emerging field in Post-Soviet Russia. In a unique collaboration that brings together diverse experts from both Russia and America, this volume showcases the Russian medical humanities as an interdisciplinary project that combines insights from philosophy, bioethics, anthropology, history, and literature in order to provide more compassionate medical care to patients in the twenty-first century. The chapters in this volume explore past and present humanistic trends in Russian medical training, as well as examine how Russian authors and cultural figures, some physician-writers, some without professional background in medicine of any kind, have positioned healthy and ailing bodies in their creative work. This volume’s contributors, who range from literary scholars, educators, translators and poets to medical historians, librarians, museum curators, and social workers, provide empathetic insight into the experience of medical encounters which all cultures grapple with. Their work will prove useful not only to current and future health practitioners, but also to a broader audience of readers who are seeking to make compassionate and informed decisions about healthcare for their loved ones and for themselves.
Download or read book Seasoned Socialism written by Anastasia Lakhtikova and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Food, both in its quality and quantity, was a powerful tool in the Soviet Union. This collection features work by scholars in an array of fields including cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, history, and food studies, and the work gathered here explores the intersection of gender, food, and culture in the post-1960s Soviet context. From personal cookbooks to gulag survival strategies, Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.
Download or read book Embodied Differences written by Henrietta Mondry and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew’s body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women’s writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.
Download or read book Foreign Countries of Old Age written by Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The exploration of what May Sarton calls the »foreign country of old age« usually does not go far beyond the familiar: the focus of aging studies has thus far clearly rested upon North America and Western Europe. This multi-disciplinary essay collection critically examines conditions and representations of old age and aging in Eastern and Southeastern Europe from various perspectives of the humanities and social sciences. By shedding light on these culturally specific contexts, the contributions widen our understanding of the aging process in all its diversity and demonstrate that a shift in perspectives might in fact challenge a number of taken-for-granted positions and presumptions of aging studies.
Download or read book Jacob s Ladder written by Ludmila Ulitskaya and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Russia’s most renowned literary figures and a Man Booker International Prize nominee, Ludmila Ulitskaya presents what may be her final novel. Jacob’s Ladder is a family saga spanning a century of recent Russian history—and represents the summation of the author’s career, devoted to sharing the absurd and tragic tales of twentieth-century life in her nation. Jumping between the diaries and letters of Jacob Ossetsky in Kiev in the early 1900s and the experiences of his granddaughter Nora in the theatrical world of Moscow in the 1970s and beyond, Jacob’s Ladder guides the reader through some of the most turbulent times in the history of Russia and Ukraine, and draws suggestive parallels between historical events of the early twentieth century and those of more recent memory. Spanning the seeming promise of the prerevolutionary years, to the dark Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day, Jacob’s Ladder is a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory. With a scale worthy of Tolstoy, it asks how much control any of us have over our lives—and how much is in fact determined by history, by chance, or indeed by the genes passed down by the generations that have preceded us into the world.
Download or read book Sonechka written by Ludmila Ulitskaya and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Los Angeles Times said of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Funeral Party, “In America we have friends, family, lovers, and parents–four kinds of love. Could it really be that in Russia they have more? Ludmila Ulitskaya makes it seem so.” In Sonechka: A Novella and Stories, Ulitskaya brings us tales of these other loves in her richly lyrical prose, populated with captivating and unusual characters. In “Queen of Spades,” Anna, a successful ophthalmologic surgeon in her sixties; her daughter, Katya; and Katya’s teenage daughter and young son live in constant terror of Anna’s mother, a domineering, autocratic, aging former beauty queen. In “Angel,” a closeted middle-aged professor marries an uneducated charwoman for love of her young son, raising the child in his image. In “The Orlov-Sokolovs,” perfectly matched young lovers are pulled apart by the Soviet academic bureaucracy. And in the stunning novella “Sonechka,” the heroine, a bookworm turned muse turned mother, reveals a love and loyalty at once astounding in its generosity and grotesque in its pathos. In these stories, love and life are lived under the radar of oppression, in want of material comfort, in obeisance to or matter-of-fact rejection of the pervasive restrictions of Soviet rule. If living well is the best revenge, then Ludmila Ulitskaya’s characters, in choosing to embrace the unique gifts that their lives bring them, are small heroes of the quotidian, their stories as funny and tender as they are brilliantly told.
Download or read book Daniel Stein Interpreter written by Ludmila Ulitskaya and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This world in which we have so much difficulty living is filled with misunderstanding at every level.' What can one man do, faced with such a world? Daniel Stein, Interpreter explores the lives of those affected by some of the worst conflicts of the twentieth century, from survivors of the ghetto and escapes of Soviet oppression to those caught up in the violence of the Arab-Israeli conflict. All of them have one thing in common: their lives are touched by Daniel Stein. Stein is a Polish Jew, who miraculously survives the Holocaust by working for the Gestapo as an interpreter. After the war, he converts to Catholicism, becomes a priest, enters the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, and emigrates to Israel. Despite this seemingly impossible progression, the life and destiny of Daniel Stein are not an invention – the character is based on the life of Oswald Rufeisen, the real Brother Daniel. Feeling his life has saved in the war for a reason, Stein dedicates himself to bringing understanding and reconciliation to a violent world, in his own compassionate and irreverent way. In an age of increasing mistrust between faiths, Daniel Stein, Interpreter serves as a timely and nuanced exploration of what it might mean to really try to understand each other. Staggering in scope, Daniel Stein, Interpreter is already seen by many as the great Russian novel of our time. Winner of the Russian National Literary Prize and the Prix Simone de Beauvoir, Ludmila Ulitskaya has earned accolades abroad for this courageous work, at last available in English. 'A feat of love and tolerance.' The Washington Post 'Ludmila Ulitskaya arrives here not just as a shrewd novelist, but as a wise and evocative artist.' The Philadelphia Inquirer 'A fascinating work . . . Achieves the height of virtuosity.' Le Monde
Download or read book The Funeral Party written by Ludmila Ulitskaya and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN? This marvelous group of individuals inhabits the first novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya to be published in English, a book that was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and has been praised wherever translated editions have appeared. Simultaneously funny and sad, lyrical in its Russian sorrow and devastatingly keen in its observation of character, The Funeral Party introduces to our shores a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.
Download or read book Sashenka written by Simon Sebag Montefiore and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winter, 1916: In St Petersburg, Russia on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Young Ladies, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar's secret police... Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just 18. In the evenings when her mother is partying with Rasputin and her dissolute friends, Sashenka becomes Comrade Snowfox and slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction. Twenty years on, and Sashenka is married to a dashing Communist leader with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, but her own family is safe. But she is about to embark on a forbidden love affair, which will have devastating consequences. Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heart-breaking story of passion and betrayal, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism--and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice.
Download or read book Special Topics in Calamity Physics written by Marisha Pessl and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-08-03 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mesmerizing New York Times bestseller by the author of Night Film Marisha Pessl’s dazzling debut sparked raves from critics and heralded the arrival of a vibrant new voice in American fiction. At the center of Special Topics in Calamity Physics is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.
Download or read book Everyday Life in Russia written by Choi Chatterjee and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A panoramic, interdisciplinary survey of Russian lives and “a must-read for any scholar engaging with Russian culture” (The Russian Review). In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized Russian daily life from pre-revolutionary times through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored. “Offers readers a richly theoretical and empirical consideration of the ‘state of play’ of everyday life as it applies to the interdisciplinary study of Russia.” —Slavic Review “An engaging look at a vibrant area of research . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Volumes of such diversity frequently miss the mark, but this one represents a welcomed introduction to and a ‘must’ read for anyone seriously interested in the subject.” —Cahiers du Monde russe
Download or read book Trance written by Christopher Sorrentino and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2006-04-18 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1974: A tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, abducts a newspaper heiress, who then abruptly announces that she has adopted the guerrilla name "Tania" and chosen to remain with her former captors. Has she been brainwashed? Coerced? Could she be sincere? Why would such a nice girl disavow her loving parents, her adoring fiancé, her comfortable home? Why would she suddenly adopt the SLA's cri de coeur, "Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People"? Soon most of the SLA are dead, killed in a suicidal confrontation with police in Los Angeles, forcing Tania and her two remaining comrades--the pompous and abusive General Teko and his duplicitous lieutenant, Yolanda--into hiding, where they will remain for the next sixteen months. Trance, Christopher Sorrentino's mesmerizing and brilliant second novel, traces this fugitive period, leading the reader on a breathtaking, hilarious, and heartbreaking underground tour across a beleaguered America, in the company of scam artists, visionaries, cultists, and a mismatched gang of middle-class people who typify the guiding conceit of their time, that of self-renovation. Along the way he tells the story of a nation divided against itself--parents and children, men and women, black and white; a story of hidebound tradition and radical change, of truth and propaganda, of cynicism and idealism; a story as transfixing and relevant today as it was then. Insightful, compassionate, scathingly funny, and moving, Trance is a virtuoso performance, placing Christopher Sorrentino in the first rank of American novelists. Trance is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
Download or read book Last Comes the Raven written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2021 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Calvino . . . managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic.” — Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection take place in a World War II–era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities. A trio of gluttonous burglars invades a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In the title story, a compact masterpiece of shifting perspectives, a panicked soldier tries to keep his wits—and his life—when he faces off against a young partisan with a loaded rifle and miraculous aim. Select stories from Last Comes the Raven have been published in translation, but the collection as a whole has never appeared in English. This volume, including several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein, is an important addition to Calvino's legacy.
Download or read book Empire of Objects written by Benjamin M. Sutcliffe and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2023 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although understudied in the West, Iurii Trifonov was a canonical Soviet author whose lifetime spanned nearly the whole of the USSR's history and who embodied many of its contradictions. The son of a Bolshevik murdered on Stalin's orders, he wrote his first novel in praise of the dictator's policies. A lifelong Muscovite, he often set his prose in the Central Asian peripheries of the USSR's empire. A subtle critic of the communist regime, he nonetheless benefited from privileges doled out by a censorious state. Scholars have both neglected Trifonov in recent years and focused their limited attention on the author's most famous works, produced in the 1960s through 1980s. Yet almost half of his output was written before then. In Empire of Objects, Benjamin Sutcliffe takes care to consider the author's entire oeuvre. Trifonov's work reflects the paradoxes of a culture that could neither honestly confront the past nor create a viable future, one that alternated between trying to address and attempting to obscure the trauma of Stalinism. He became increasingly incensed by what he perceived as the erosion of sincerity in public and private life, by the impact of technology, and by the state's tacit support of greed and materialism. Trifonov's work, though fictional, offers a compelling window into Soviet culture.
