Download or read book Memoirs or Diary of a Madman written by Nikolai Gogol and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This early work by Nikolai Gogol was originally published in 1835 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Memoirs; or, Diary of a Madman' is a short story about the life of a minor civil servant during the repressive era of Nicholas I. Following the format of a diary, the story shows the descent of the protagonist, Poprishchin, into insanity. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born in Sorochintsi, Ukraine in 1809. In 1831, Gogol brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories, 'Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka'. It met with immediate success, and he followed it a year later with a second volume. 'The Nose' is regarded as a masterwork of comic short fiction, and 'The Overcoat' is now seen as one of the greatest short stories ever written; some years later, Dostoyevsky famously stated "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'." He is seen by many contemporary critics as one of the greatest short story writers who has ever lived, and the Father of Russia's Golden Age of Realism.
Download or read book Memoirs of a Madman written by Nikolai Gogol and published by Lindhardt og Ringhof. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Memoirs of a Madman’ is a fascinating short following Poprishchin, a minor civil servant, as he descends into insanity. Unique in Golgol’s collection, it is the only story he wrote completely from the first person in the form of a number of diary entries. Constantly ridiculed by friends and repressed by the government of Tsarist Russia, he confides all in his journal documenting his slow decline in to insanity. As the only account we have is Poprishchin’s, we have no idea if the continually fantastical events happening before us are real or simply figments of his imagination. It is a fascinating novel, equally humourous as it is farcical, from talking dogs to tea-thirsty cows if you liked Leonardo Dicaprio’s ‘Shutter island’ you’ll love this short. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was one of the first writers to adopt surrealism and the grotesque in his work. As well as being one of Russia’s most acclaimed authors, he is acknowledged as one of the founders of the short story genre alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne and E.T.A Hoffman. His early writing was largely inspired by his time spent growing up in Ukraine, it’s culture and it’s folklore, while his later writing targeted and satirised the political corruption of the Russian Empire. His unique and strange form of writing similar to the ‘ostranenie’ technique, allowed his audience to see familiar topics and stories from a completely new perspective. Acknowledged for his brilliance by many acclaimed authors such as Fedor Dostoevsky his best works include ‘Dead Souls’, ‘Taras Bulba’ and ‘Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka’.
Download or read book The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner written by James Hogg and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2006-05-25 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brought up by a strict Calvinist pastor, Robert Wringham believes he is one of the elect, predestined for salvation while all others - including his real father and brother - are cursed. Convinced he is indestructible and above the law, Robert commits terrible crimes under the influence of Gil-Martin - his physical double - who claims they are acting in God's name to purify the world. But does this mysterious tempter actually exist? Could he be an agent of the devil? Subversive and unsettling, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is a compelling psychological depiction of religious bigotry and the seductive effects of power on a tormented soul.
Download or read book Lectures on Dostoevsky written by Joseph Frank and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major works Joseph Frank (1918–2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career—from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Bringing Joseph Frank’s unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times. The book also includes Frank's favorite review of his Dostoevsky biography, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace, originally published in the Village Voice.
Download or read book Memoirs of John Quincy Adams Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848 Vol 1 written by Charles Francis Adams and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Quincy Adams was the sixth President of the United States but holds a place in history as probably of America's greatest ever diplomats, negotiating many of the treaties that have formed the United States as we know them today. This is a fascinating biography and a must read for any fan of political history.
Download or read book Memoirs of John Quincy Adams comprising portions of his diary from 1795 to 1848 Volume 1 written by Adams, John Quincy and published by Best Books on. This book was released on 1795-01-01 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book After Dinner Conversation written by José Asunción Silva and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lost in a shipwreck in 1895, rewritten before the author's suicide in 1896, and not published until 1925, José Asunción Silva's After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa) is one of Latin America's finest fin de siècle novels and the first one to be translated into English. Perhaps the single best work for understanding turn-of-the-twentieth-century writing in South America, After-Dinner Conversation is also cited as the continent's first psychological novel and an outstanding example of modernista fiction and the Decadent sensibility. Semi-autobiographical and more important for style than plot, After-Dinner Conversation is the diary of a Decadent sensation-collector in exile in Paris who undertakes a quest to find his beloved Helen, a vision whom his fevered imagination sees as his salvation. Along the way, he struggles with irreconcilable urges and temptations that pull him in every direction while he endures an environment indifferent or hostile to spiritual and intellectual pursuits, as did the modernista writers themselves. Kelly Washbourne's excellent translation preserves Silva's lush prose and experimental style. In the introduction, one of the most wide-ranging in Silva criticism, Washbourne places the life and work of Silva in their literary and historical contexts, including an extended discussion of how After-Dinner Conversation fits within Spanish American modernismo and the Decadent movement. Washbourne's perceptive comments and notes also make the novel accessible to general readers, who will find the work surprisingly fresh more than a century after its composition.
Download or read book The Burdens of Survival written by David C. Stahl and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although still virtually unknown in the West, Ôoka Shôhei (1909-1988) is one of Japan's most important and influential writers and social critics. The Burdens of Survival is both a seminal English-language study of this preeminent literary figure and one of the first scholarly works to thoroughly examine the war literature of a major Japanese veteran-author. Drawing on Robert Jay Lifton's work on traumatic experience and survivor psychology, the book tells the illuminating story of Ôoka's arduous journey that began with guilt-ridden survival as a prisoner of war in the Philippines and culminated some twenty-five years later in the fruitful completion of survivor mission. David C. Stahl examines Ôoka's battlefield memoirs, including the established war classic Fires on the Plain (1952), in terms of extreme experience, survivor guilt, bearing witness, and the "inability to mourn." Writing enabled Ôoka to give cathartic expression to his haunting battlefield experience and made it possible for him to move from blame-shifting to empathy and mourning. The lengthy, exhaustively researched historical work The Battle for Leyte Island (1967-1969) faithfully details the personal and collective experience of battle, depravation, and loss, and clarifies who and what was ultimately responsible for defeat. Toward the end of this work and Return to Mindoro Island (1969), Ooka draws attention to the outstanding obligations owed by his countrymen to the war dead and suggests how they can be fulfilled by public confrontation, learning the lessons of defeat, and using them to rectify lingering social and political evils.
Download or read book The Hitler Diaries written by Charles Hamilton and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now for the first time, the complete expose of the most daring and successful forgery of all time. For seven days in April 1983, the sensational discovery of Hitler's sixty-two volumes of secret diaries dominated the news headlines of the world. Scholars hailed the diaries as the greatest find of the century, a historical bonanza that would entirely alter our views of Hitler and the Third Reich. Shocked readers followed daily installments showing that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust. Then, in an abrupt reversal, the diaries were proved to be bogus!
Download or read book The Slavic Literatures written by Richard Casimir Lewanski and published by New York : New York Public Library, and F. Ungar Publishing Company. This book was released on 1967 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Madness Art and Society written by Anna Harpin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is madness experienced, treated, and represented? How might art think around – and beyond – psychiatric definitions of illness and wellbeing? Madness, Art, and Society engages with artistic practices from theatre and live art to graphic fiction, charting a multiplicity of ways of thinking critically with, rather than about, non-normative psychological experience. It is organised into two parts: ‘Structures: psychiatrists, institutions, treatments’, illuminates the environments, figures and primary models of psychiatric care, reconsidering their history and contemporary manifestations through case studies including David Edgar’s Mary Barnes and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘Experiences: realities, bodies, moods’, promblematises diagnostic categories and proposes more radically open models of thinking in relation to experiences of madness, touching upon works such as Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places, and Things. Reading its case studies as a counter-discourse to orthodox psychiatry, Madness, Art, and Society seeks a more nuanced understanding of the plurality of madness in society, and in so doing, offers an outstanding resource for students and scholars alike.
Download or read book A Kite in the Wind written by Andrea Barrett and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kite in the Wind is an anthology of essays by 20 veteran writers and master teachers. While the contributors offer specific, practical advice on such fundamental aspects of craft as characterization, character names, the first person point of view, and unreliable narrators, they also give extended, thoughtful consideration to more sophisticated topics, including “imminence,” or the power of a sense of beginning; creating and maintaining tension; “lushness”; and the deliberate manipulation of information to create particular effects. The essays in A Kite in the Wind begin as personal investigations — attempts to understand why a decision in a particular story or novel seemed unsuccessful; to define a quality or problem that seemed either unrecognized or unsatisfactorily defined; to understand what, despite years of experience as a fiction writer, resisted comprehension; and to pursue haunting, even unanswerable questions. Unlike a how-to book, the anthology is less an instruction manual than it is an intimate visit with twenty very different writers as they explore topics that excite, intrigue, and even puzzle them. Each discussion uses specific examples and illustrations, including both canonical stories and novels and writing less frequently discussed, from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, by both American and international authors. The contributors share their hard-earned insights for beginning and advanced writers with humility, wit, and compassion. The first section of the book focuses on narration, with particular attention paid to various kinds of narrators; the second, on strategic creation and presentation of character; the third, on some of the roles of the visual, beginning with establishing setting; and the fourth, on structural and organizational issues, from movement through time to the manipulation of information to create mystery and suspense.
Download or read book Nabokov s Art of Memory and European Modernism written by John Burt Foster, Jr. and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1993-02-08 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite Vladimir Nabokov's hostility toward literary labels, he clearly recognized his own place in cultural history. In a fresh approach stressing Nabokov's European context, John Foster shows how this writer's art of memory intersects with early twentieth-century modernism. Tracing his interests in temporal perspective and the mnemonic image, in intertextual "reminiscences," and in individuality amid cultural multiplicity, the book begins with such early Russian novels as Mary, then treats his emerging art of memory from Laughter in the Dark to The Gift. After discussing the author's cultural repositioning in his first English novels, Foster turns to Nabokov's masterpiece as an artist of memory, the autobiography Speak, Memory, and ends with an epilogue on Pale Fire. As a cross-cultural overview of modernism, this book examines how Nabokov navigated among Proust and Bergson, Freud and Mann, and Joyce and Eliot. It also explores his response to Baudelaire and Nietzsche as theorists of modernity, and his sense of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin as modernist precursors. As an approach to Nabokov, the book reflects the heightened importance of autobiography in current literary study. Other critical issues addressed include Bakhtin's theory of intertextuality, deconstructive views of memory, Benjamin's modernism of memory, and Nabokov's assumptions about modernism as a concept.
Download or read book Essays in Poetics written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Feliks Volkhovskii written by Michael Hughes and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feliks Volkhovskii (1846-1914) was a significant figure in the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lived through pivotal changes ranging from the rise of ‘nihilism’ in the 1860s and the growth of populism in the 1870s, through to the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the early 1900s. Imprisoned three times before he turned thirty, he spent ten years in Siberian exile before fleeing abroad to join the fight against tsarist autocracy from western Europe. Following Volkhovskii’s arrival in Britain in 1890, he played a central role in the campaign to win sympathy for the Russian revolutionary movement, editing newspapers and journals including Free Russia. He also helped to smuggle propaganda into Russia as well as becoming one of the most prominent figures in the émigré leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Throughout his life, Volkhovskii was also a prolific writer of poetry and short stories, and was on good terms with many leading literary figures of the time including Ford Maddox Ford and Edward and Constance Garnett. Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.
Download or read book Nabokov s Fifth Arc written by J. E. Rivers and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov compared his life to a spiral, in which “twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series.” The first four arcs of the spiral of Nabokov’s life—his youth in Russia, voluntary exile in Europe, two decades spent in the United States, and the final years of his life in Switzerland—are now followed by a fifth arc, his continuing life in literary history, which this volume both explores and symbolizes. This is the first collection of essays to examine all five arcs of Nabokov’s creative life through close analyses of representative works. The essays cast new light on works both famous and neglected and place these works against the backgrounds of Nabokov’s career as a whole and modern literature in general. Nabokov analyzes his own artistry in his “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita,” presented here in its first English translation, and in his little-known “Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom,” published now for the first time in America and keyed to the standard U.S. editions of the novel. In addition to a defense of his father’s work by Dmitri Nabokov and a portrait-interview by Alfred Appel, Jr., the volume presents a vast spectrum of critical analyses covering all Nabokov’s major novels and several important short stories. The highly original structure of the book and the fresh and often startling revelations of the essays dramatize as never before the unity and richness of Nabokov’s unique literary achievement.
Download or read book Dr Z written by Paul Zimmerman and published by Triumph Books. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his nearly 50 years of sportswriting, including 28 at Sports Illustrated, readers of Dr. Z came to expect a certain alchemical, trademark blend: words which were caustic and wry, at times self-deprecating or even puzzling, but always devilishly smart with arresting honesty. A complex package, that's the Doctor. The one-time sparring partner of Ernest Hemingway, Paul Zimmerman is one of the modern era's groundbreaking football minds, a man who methodically charted every play while generating copious notes, a human precursor to the data analytics websites of today. In 2008, Zimmerman had nearly completed work on his personal memoirs when a series of strokes left him largely unable to speak, read, or write. Compiled and edited by longtime SI colleague Peter King, these are the stories he still wants to see told. Dr. Z's memoir is a rich package of personalities, stories never shared about such characters as Vince Lombardi, Walter Payton, Lawrence Taylor, and Johnny Unitas. Even Joe Namath, with whom Zimmerman had a legendary and well-documented 23-year feud, saw fit to eventually unburden himself to the remarkable scribe. Also included are Zimmerman's encounters with luminaries and larger-than-life figures outside of sports, notably Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, and Hunter S. Thompson. But not to be missed are Zimmerman's quieter observations on his own life and writing, witticisms and anecdotes which sway between the poignant and hilarious. No matter the topic, Dr. Z: the Lost Memoirs of an Irreverent Football Writer proves essential, compelling reading for sports fans old and new.
