Download or read book Little Zinnobers written by Elena Chizhova and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-01-02 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible to cultivate fundamental human values if you live in a totalitarian state? A teacher who instigates the school theatre sets out to prove that it is. But while the pupils rehearse Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies under her ever-vigilant eye, Soviet life makes its brutal adjustments. This can be called a book about love, the tough kind of love that gets you through life, and death. Little Zinnobers is especially fascinating for British readers as we see Shakespeare’s famous sonnets and plays are touchingly brought to life by the Russian children and their gifted teacher, the novel’s heroine. The teacher applies some of the playwright’s satire to the socio-political situation of the USSR, using her English lessons to teach her students life’s broader lessons, too. Echoes of the Soviet Union can be felt in our own society today: the people find themselves increasingly at odds with the politicians’ hypocrisy, ‘big brother’ is watching us through thousands of CCTVs, and political correctness determines what we can and cannot say. It is these subtle undercurrents which help make Chizhova’s novel particularly pertinent to today’s readership. Apart from being a magnificently written, first-rate story, Little Zinnobers is unique in that it goes beyond the realm of politics or fiction to shed a new light on the relevance of British literary heritage today. Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.

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 I Want a Baby and Other Plays written by Sergei Tretyakov and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Sergei Tretyakov’s ground-breaking play, I Want a Baby, was banned by Stalin’s censor in 1927, it was a signal that the radical and innovative theatre of the early Soviet years was to be brought to an end. A glittering, unblinking exploration of the realities of post-revolutionary Soviet life, I Want a Baby marks a high point in modernist experimental drama. Tretyakov’s plays are notable for their formal originality and their revolutionary content. The World Upside Down, which was staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1923, concerns a failed agrarian revolution. A Wise Man, originally directed by the great film director and Tretyakov’s friend, Sergei Eisenstein, is a clown show set in the Paris of the émigré White Russians. Are You Listening, Moscow?! and Gas Masks are ‘agit-melodramas’, fierce, fast-moving and edgy. And Roar, China!dramatises an actual incident in the West’s oppression of China, when a British gunboat captain threatened to blow the city of Wanxien to bits. Roar, China! was translated into many languages and produced in cities across the world. The nerve this play touched may be gauged from the fact that it was staged in Yiddish translation in the Czestochowa concentration camp by Jewish prisoners during World War II. These plays are not only stirring in their themes, they are also hugely significant in their construction. Tretyakov’s early plays led directly to Eisenstein’s highly influential theory of ‘the montage of attractions’, while later his ideas were crucial in the formation of Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theatre. The reason why is evident in his plays, now collected and published for the first time.

Download or read book A Burglar of the Better Sort written by Tytus Czyżewski and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Poland, since the eighteenth century, has been marked by an almost unending struggle for survival. From 1795 through 1945, she was partitioned four times by her stronger neighbours, most of whom were intent on suppressing if not eradicating Polish culture. It is not surprising, then, that much of the great literature written in modern Poland has been politically and patriotically engaged. Yet there is a second current as well, that of authors devoted above all to the craft of literary expression, creating ‘art for art’s sake,’ and not as a didactic national service. Such a poet is Tytus Czyżewski, one of the chief, and most interesting, literary figures of the twentieth century. Growing to maturity in the benign Austrian partition of Poland, and creating most of his works in the twenty-year window of authentic Polish independence stretching between the two world wars, Czyżewski is an avant-garde poet, dramatist and painter who popularised the new approach to poetry established in France by Guillaume Apollinaire, and was to exert a marked influence on such multi-faceted artists as Tadeusz Kantor. A Burglar of the Better Sort offers, in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski, the entirety of Czyżewski’s surviving literary output, from surrealistic plays like Donkey and Sun in Metamorphosis and his inimitable ‘formistic poems’ through the playful Christmas ‘pastorals’ — which so delighted Czesław Miłosz — to his theoretical writings, which form the basis for his radically individual, shamanistic approach to literary creation. A truly global talent, Czyżewski belongs to the world, a world which, beyond Poland, finally has the opportunity to get to know him.

Download or read book The Mouseiad and other Mock Epics written by Ignacy Krasicki and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International brigades of mice and rats join forces to defend the rodents of Poland, threatened with extermination at the paws of cats favoured by the ancient ruler King Popiel, a sybaritic, cowardly ruler... The Hag of Discord incites a vicious rivalry between monastic orders, which only the good monks’ common devotion to... fortified spirits... is able to allay... The present translation of the mock epics of Poland’s greatest figure of the Enlightenment, Ignacy Krasicki, brings together the Mouseiad, the Monachomachia, and the Anti-monachomachia — a tongue-in-cheek ‘retraction’ of the former work by the author, criticised for so roundly (and effectively) satirising the faults of the Church, of which he himself was a prince. Krasicki towers over all forms of eighteenth-century literature in Poland like Voltaire, Swift, Pope, and LaFontaine all rolled into one. While his fables constitute his most well-known works of poetry, in the words of American comparatist Harold Segel, ‘the good bishop’s mock-epic poems [...] are the most impressive examples of his literary gifts.’ This English translation by Charles S. Kraszewski is rounded off by one of Krasicki’s lesser-known works, The Chocim War, the poet’s only foray into the genre of the serious, Vergilian epic.

Download or read book Orchestra written by Vladimir Gonik and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel by Russian novelist and screenwriter Vladimir Gonik is set in eleven countries around the world. Orchestra is based on documentary materials: the author has delved into the archives and met eyewitnesses, and now he recounts secret operations that took place across the globe in the second half of the twentieth century. The novel tells of certain little-known and mysterious events, some of which the author was personally involved in, and it is a story of extraordinary human lives, and of course, love... Vladimir Gonik was born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1939, and studied medicine in the Latvian city of Riga. He has been a foundry worker, a hospital orderly, a sailor on oceanic vessels, and a medic in the army. A keen athlete, he has practiced boxing, football, cross-country and downhill skiing, and he has served as a physician for Russian national teams and Olympic delegations in various sports. Alongside his other pursuits, he is a graduate of Moscow’s Institute of Cinematography. He is the author of twelve screenplays and seven books, and his work has been recognized with international and Russian awards for cinema.

Download or read book The Selected Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak written by Bohdan Rubchak and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only a handful of prominent émigré Ukrainian poet-scholar Bohdan Rubchak’s poems have appeared in English translation prior to the publication of this volume. Rubchak died in 2018 at the age of 83 after publishing six collections of poetry, the last for which he received the prestigious Pavlo Tychyna Prize in Ukraine in 1993. Rubchak was part of the extremely talented displaced generation that escaped from the traumatic experiences of World War II to find a new life and creative inspiration in a new land. As an integral part of the New York Group of Ukrainian poets, his complex, at times seemingly cryptic poetry, makes the translator’s task imposing. His poems are filled with meaning on multiple levels – semantic, syntactic, auditory, symbolic, and allusive. The volume, co-translated by Michael M. Naydan and Svitlana Budzhak-Jones, includes selections from all six of Rubchak’s published collections of poetry: The Stone Garden (1956), The Radiant Betrayal (1960), The Girl without a Country (1963), A Personal Clio (1967), Drowning Marena that appeared as part of The Wing of Icarus (1983) selected works volume, and the expanded selected works edition The Wing of Icarus (1991), which was the poet’s only collection of poetry published in Ukraine. The book also contains an intimate and revealing biographical essay based on the poet’s unpublished diaries by his wife of over fifty years Marian J. Rubchak, illuminating essays on his poetry by Svitlana Budzhak-Jones and Mykola Riabchuk, and a brief biographical essay and timeline by Michael M. Naydan, the editor of the volume.

Download or read book On the Road to Freedom written by Janko Jesenský and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘“Brother, you have another pair of boots,” Jaroslav Hašek said to me, grabbing me by the sleeve. “How do you know?” “Yesterday you were in army boots, and today you’ve got civilian ones on. I’d buy those army boots off you.” And in this way my high-laced boots, which I was given by the Austrian Red Cross way back in Beryozovka-za-Baikalom, came into Hašek’s possession. It was a silly thing to do. Not because I should have known that I wouldn’t get a kopeck out of Hašek in exchange for them — at bottom, I did know that — but as a former soldier, I should have thought about reserves. Life is a war and in this war, sometimes boots become casualties.’ Thus ruefully muses Janko Jesenský, Slovak poet and politician, in the pages of his On the Road to Freedom. This book, newly translated into English by Charles S. Kraszewski, is unique among the memoirs that came out of the First World War, as it chronicles not desperate charges or trench warfare, but the daily life of Austrian prisoners of war taken into Russian captivity at the very outset of the conflict. Of course, the reader will find more than one exciting passage in On the Road to Freedom, from eyewitness accounts of the Soviet Revolution in Kiev and Saint Petersburg to the heroic and bloody route cut by the Czechoslovak Legions through Red Army forces as the former POWs make their way across Siberia to Vladivostok and the long steamboat journey home, where they will aid in establishing the newly independent Republic of Czechoslovakia. But the most engaging aspect of On the Road to Freedom, and the poems that Jesenský composed during his Russian captivity (a generous selection of which are appended to these memoirs), is the palpable experience of the daily life of the POW — far from home, cold, and hungry, one of the ‘ants [who] / Roil the yard with mess-plates in their hands — / Like hungry beasts for fish-soup from the kitchen.’ Besides their value as literary texts, Janko Jesenský’s wartime writings in verse and prose are a welcome addition to the English library of early twentieth century history. They provide a fresh, Slovak perspective on the ‘Great War,’ the Russian Revolution, the establishment of the Czechoslovak state, and the situation of the smaller Central European nations on the chessboard of politics dominated by great powers. This book was published with a financial support from SLOLIA, Centre for Information on Literature in Bratislava.

Download or read book The Lawyer from Lychakiv Street written by Andriy Kokotiukha and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2023-04-01 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the twentieth century, 1908, a young Kyivan, Klym Koshovy miraculously flies the coop and escapes from persecution by tsarist police to Lviv. However, even here he is arrested - near the corpse of a well-known local lawyer Yevhen Soyka. The deceased had dubious friends and powerful enemies in the city. Suicide or murder? The search for truth leads Koshovy through the dark labyrinths of Lviv's streets. On his way - facing pickpockets, criminal kingpins and Russian terrorist bombers. And Klym is constantly getting in the way of the police commissioner Marek Wichura. The truth will stun Klym, and his new loyal friend Jozef Shatsky. It will forever change the fate of the enigmatic and influential beauty Magda Bohdanovych. This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Grant Program. Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor.

Download or read book The Vow written by Jiří Kratochvil and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-12-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can something that exists merely as a literary text, say a story, come about in real life? Can reality, to put it another way, steal something from literature, the same way literature steals from reality? Such is the question that Libor Hrach, the author of The Adventures of the Wise Badger, fields one evening over a hedonistic supper in a tony Brno restaurant from Kamil Modráček, himself a burrowing animal of sorts, in Jiří Kratochvil’s novel The Vow. ‘Quite simply, I said, everything that has been written either has already happened, or is about to. You write a story, and you can never be sure if what you’re writing isn’t actually taking place two streets away from where you sit...’ If this does not send chills down the spine of the reader of The Vow, they have got a high tolerance for the creepy. Set in 1950s Brno, at the height of Gottwald’s Stalinist reshaping of Czechoslovakia into a Communist prison, and partially in today’s independent Czech Republic, Kratochvil, alternating between the dry Czech humour of Jaroslav Hašek and the uncanny, chilling otherworldliness of Edgar Allan Poe, takes the reader on a journey such as they have never been on before: to geographic areas in the beautiful Moravian city where no foot has set since the Middle Ages, and... places deep inside all of us, where most of us would rather never venture... Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Download or read book Ravens before Noah written by Susanna Harutyunyan and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-12-23 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel is set in the Armenian mountains sometime in 1915-1960. An old man and a new born baby boy escape from the Hamidian massacres in Turkey in 1894 and hide themselves in the ruins of a demolished and abandoned village. The village soon becomes a shelter for many others, who flee from problems with the law, their families, or their past lives. The villagers survive in this secret shelter, cut off from the rest of the world, by selling or bartering their agricultural products in the villages beneath the mountain. Years pass by, and the child saved by the old man grows into a young man, Harout. He falls for a beautiful girl who arrived in the village after being tortured by Turkish soldiers. She is pregnant and the old women of the village want to kill the twin baby girls as soon as they are born, to wash away the shame... This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the “Armenian Literature in Translation” Program.

Download or read book Khatyn written by Ales Adamovych and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a quiet place, with lush green grass covering the location of the former Belarusian village. A village that was burned to the ground with its inhabitants in 1943. Anyone familiar with this small corner of Eastern Europe is chilled to the bone by the events that transpired there, and the village’s name Khatyn has now come to embody a horrific national tragedy. But tragedy is not all this name embodies, for it also reminds people of the tremendous courage of those who fought for the life and freedom of their country. It is the story of this village and the events that surround its annihilation that are the focus of Ales Adamovich’s novel Khatyn, which was written on the basis of historical documents. The author, himself a World War II veteran and partisan, depicts the reality of the partisan resistance to fascism in Belarus. The main character is a man named Florian, who in his memories returns to events that transpired some thirty years ago, when as a teenager he joined a partisan unit and met his future wife, Glasha. He witnesses how the villagers of Khatyn are burned alive as reprisal for supporting the partisan movement. The monstrous cruelty of the death squad and its commanders manifested itself in the act of punishing the entire community for the deeds of those who had helped the partisans. The village, composed mostly of the elderly and mothers with children, was locked inside a barn. After being covered with dry hay, the barn was set ablaze with the families inside. Over half a century later, Adamovich’s story about the courage of ordinary people has not lost its immediacy. Today, the world is still marred by war crimes committed against communities of noncombatant. Khatyn is a testament to an event that must not be forgotten, and to a reality that must not be repeated.

Download or read book The Code of Civilization written by Vyacheslav Nikonov and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 969 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his book, Vyacheslav Nikonov shows the origins of the modern world and traces the chronologies and histories of peoples and countries. Nikonov discusses the main centers of influence and forces that shape the world in which we live. The world demonstrates a variety of development models shaped by the national, regional, historical, religious and other aspects of each country. The center of gravity of world development is shifting from West to East, from North to South, from developed economies to ​​developing ones. Thirty years ago, Western countries accounted for 80% of the world economy; now it is less than half. Asia, already home to most of humanity, will become a global leader in the coming decades. What does this mean? What will the world be like and what place will Russia take in it? Will American hegemony continue? Will China become a superpower? Will Europe become a museum for tourists from other continents? History has resumed its course and the world is rushing towards an unstoppable diversity. Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.

Download or read book Dramatic Works written by Cyprian Kamil Norwid and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Perhaps some day I’ll disappear forever,’ muses the master-builder Psymmachus in Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Cleopatra and Caesar, ‘Becoming one with my work...’ Today, exactly two hundred years from the poet’s birth, it is difficult not to hear Norwid speaking through the lips of his character. The greatest poet of the second phase of Polish Romanticism, Norwid, like Gerard Manley Hopkins in England, created a new poetic idiom so ahead of his time, that he virtually ‘disappeared’ from the artistic consciousness of his homeland until his triumphant rediscovery in the twentieth century. Chiefly lauded for his lyric poetry, Norwid also created a corpus of dramatic works astonishing in their breadth, from the Shakespearean Cleopatra and Caesar cited above, through the mystical dramas Wanda and Krakus, the Unknown Prince, both of which foretell the monumental style of Stanisław Wyspiański, whom Norwid influenced, and drawing-room comedies such as Pure Love at the Sea Baths and The Ring of the Grande Dame which combine great satirical humour with a philosophical depth that can only be compared to the later plays of T.S. Eliot. All of these works, and more, are collected in Charles S. Kraszewski’s English translation of Norwid’s Dramatic Works, which along with the major plays also includes selections from Norwid’s short, lyrical dramatic sketches — something along the order of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies. Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Dramatic Works will be a valuable addition to the library of anyone who loves Polish Literature, Romanticism, or theatre in general.

Download or read book Subterranean Fire written by Natalka Bilotserkivets and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passionate intensity moves through the subjective, intimate voice of the poems of Natalka Bilotserkivets. Through translation, Subterranean Fire continues their mysterious pilgrimage to their second lives. From one of the true inheritors – touchstones like Anna Akhmatova, Gabriela Mistral, and Louise Bogan – the poems of Bilotserkivets inhabit us as they include us in their transcendent borderland. – American poet James Brasfield With great depths of feeling, Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poetry guides us into that uncharted territory where word meets heart. The poems, spare and often questioning, redeem that land between what is most difficult to grasp and most difficult to forget. – Dzvinia Orlowsky, American poet and translator Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poetry ...is characterized by tight form and elegiac feelings ... this reader was impressed by the liquid cascade of alliterations in her ... poems. – Professor Andrew Wachtel ...contemporary Ukrainian literature has been enriched by the unique pearl of [Natalka Bilotserkivets’s] intellectual and lyrical poetry. – Ukrainian prose writer, poet, and essayist Kost Moskalets I am certain that this first-rate modern Ukrainian poet could become a star of world lyric poetry... – Ukrainian poet and prose writer Ludmyla Taran

Download or read book The Night Reporter written by Yuri Vynnychuk and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The events of the novel The Night Reporter take place in Lviv in 1938. Journalist Marko Krylovych, nicknamed the “night reporter” for his nightly coverage of the life of the city’s underbelly, takes on the investigation of the murder of a candidate for president of the city government. While doing this, he ends up in various love intrigues as well as criminal adventures, sometimes risking his life. Police Commissioner Roman Obukh, who was suspended by administrators from the murder investigation, aids him in an unofficial capacity. Meanwhile, German, and Soviet spies become involved, and Polish counterintelligence also takes an interest in the investigation. The picturesque and vividly described criminal world of Lviv of that time appears before us – dive bars, batyars, and establishments for women of ill repute. The reader will have to unravel riddle after riddle with the characters against the background of the anxious mood of Lviv’s residents, who are living in anticipation of war. The Night Reporter is a compelling journey into the world of the enthralling multicultural past of the city.

Download or read book Everyday Stories written by Mima Mihajlović and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of short writings depicts different aspects of ordinary life: work, love, friends, family, sex, as well as language identity, immigration to the Wonderland, and nostalgia for the lost home. Often ironic about herself and her characters, Mima plays with genres to create a loosely-connected narrative throughout different stories. Her collection of “short” stories about the everyday include horror stories, a turnip tale, and a dictionary of unfamiliar words, among others, and a range of peculiar characters, such as Little Girl, Fear, Titoslav (Tisi, or T.), and Zoka, a boy from the Balkans, which are “probably somewhere in South America.” Seasoned with the author’s street maxims, the book is about the vicissitudes of life, East meeting West and West meeting East, and the ordinary that is extraordinary. Everyday Stories were first published in Bosnian as Obične Priče in 2018 by Bratstvo Duša, a well-known underground books and comics publishing house from Zagreb, Croatia, founded and run by the underground legend from ex-Yugoslavia, Zdenko Franjić. The black-and-white illustrations by Elvis Dolić contribute to the book’s unique character and indie feel.