Download or read book The Battle of the Sexes Russian Style written by Nadezhda Ptushkina and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ptushkina's plays reflect her keen interest in constructing multidimensional characters that reflect the myriad ways people are affected by today's turbulent world. Often writing strong female roles, she does not shy away from exploring the sometimes tragic implications that lie behind her comical, almost farcical scenes. Ptushkina questions the nature of love, and explores the boundaries between the spiritual and the base, the constructive and the destructive, that lie within every human being. Her writing questions the relationship between ideals and reality, and between truth and deception. In this new translation, western readers have a chance to discover why Ptushkina's work holds such a wide appeal in the Russian theatre. “The universal themes of love, the need for human closeness, and multifaceted complex female characters make Nadezhda Ptushkina’s plays desirable material for any professional theatre,” says Slava Yastremski in the preface to this edition. Current edition contains such famous Ptushkina’s plays as I Pay Up Front, Somebody Else’s Candlelight, Momma’s Dying Again, My Goldfish and Rachel’s Flute. Translated from the Russian by Slava Yastremsky and Michael M. Naydan.
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 A Brown Man in Russia written by Vijay Menon and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brown Man in Russia describes the fantastical travels of a young, colored American traveler as he backpacks across Russia in the middle of winter via the Trans-Siberian. The book is a hybrid between the curmudgeonly travelogues of Paul Theroux and the philosophical works of Robert Pirsig. Styled in the vein of Hofstadter, the author lays out a series of absurd, but true stories followed by a deeper rumination on what they mean and why they matter. Each chapter presents a vivid anecdote from the perspective of the fumbling traveler and concludes with a deeper lesson to be gleaned. For those who recognize the discordant nature of our world in a time ripe for demagoguery and for those who want to make it better, the book is an all too welcome antidote. It explores the current global climate of despair over differences and outputs a very different message – one of hope and shared understanding. At times surreal, at times inappropriate, at times hilarious, and at times deeply human, A Brown Man in Russia is a reminder to those who feel marginalized, hopeless, or endlessly divided that harmony is achievable even in the most unlikely of places.
Download or read book The Hemingway Game written by Evgeny Grishkovets and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hemingway Game is an urban romance which depicts the life of a shirt over the course of one day (worn in the morning and taken off late at night); revealing a lot about the main character, who subsequently moved to Moscow some time ago. He, just like all of us, wakes up in the morning, goes to work, meets his friends and has his daily routine; that is until love changes everything. Written in a similar style to Grishkovets plays, this short novel depicts the same type of unity of time, place and action, as well as psychological subtlety. The Hemingway Game is the first novel from Russian playwright and performer of his own plays, Evgeny Grishkovets.
Download or read book The Secret History of my Sojourn in Russia written by Jaroslav Hašek and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jaroslav Hašek is known by readers around the world as the author of The Good Soldier Švejk, one of the greatest comic novels of all time. Not all of his fans are aware of his six year anabasis in Russia, however, which began with his capture on the front lines of Galicia during the First World War. The Secret History of My Sojourn in Russia, translated by Charles S. Kraszewski, brings that fascinating period in Hašek's life to the attention of the English reader. Comprised of fifty-two short stories and other writings from Hašek's stay in Sovietising Russia, The Secret History collects the Bugulma stories, in which Hašek trains his satirical eye on the infant communist utopia, as well as non-fiction works by Hašek, who played a not insignificant role in the progress of the Soviet Revolution in Siberia, before his return to his native Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s. These include propagandistic pamphlets and newspaper articles, letters, and official scripts dating from his agitation as a communist operative among Austro-Hungarian citizens stranded in the Soviet Union, all of which provide a fascinating context for his good-humoured fiction, which rivals his great novel in rollicking fun. The Secret History of My Sojourn in Russia presents the reader with 52 of the most entertaining, and chilling, examples of his Russian period, containing both humorous fiction and deadly serious propaganda. Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
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 Slavdom written by Ľudovít Štúr and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Why do you whimper and wail, O Tatra streams and rivers, who carry your plaintive lament resounding to the sea?’ asks the narrator toward the end of The Slovaks, in Ancient Days, and Now. They respond: ‘Because our human compatriots do not join together in memory, as we our waters mix with our origin, and because their lives do not resound booming, but roll on unconsciously, like hidden streams, silently to the sea of the life of the nations, young man!’ This quotation from the most famous prose work of Ľudovít Štúr (1815 – 1856) might be set as a motto to the literary career of Slovakia’s greatest Romantic poet, publicist, and political activist. For all of Štúr’s writings aim at one goal: the propagation of the national traditions of the Slovaks in an age when their nation was threatened with such repression from the Magyar majority in Hungary, that the complete extinction of the Slovak language and culture was a real possibility. Slavdom: A Selection of his Writings in Prose and Verse presents the reader with a wide selection of the creative output of a great Slovak writer, and an important Pan-Slav thinker. Divided in three parts: ‘Slovakia,’ ‘Pan-Slavism’ and ‘Russia,’ it reflects the development of Štúr’s thought, from his insistence on the importance of the Slovak past and the quality of Slovak culture, through his attempts to find a modus vivendi within the Austro-Hungarian Empire by uniting all of the Slavic nations of Austria together in a federation under the Habsburg crown (Austro-Slavism) to his arguments for all Slavs to unite under the hegemony of Russia, when the events following the Spring of the Peoples in 1848 proved Austro-Slavism a dead alley. Slavdom offers a generous selection of Štúr’s writings, from Slavic apologetics such as The Contribution of the Slavs to European Civilisation though selections of his poetry, chiefly, the two great chansons de geste centring on the ancient Great Moravian Empire: Svatoboj and Matúš of Trenčín. A must read for anyone interested in Slovak literature, Pan-Slavism, and European Romanticism in general. This book was published with a financial support from SLOLIA, Centre for Information on Literature in Bratislava.
Download or read book Mikhail Bulgakov written by Marietta Chudakova and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 855 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marietta Chudakova is an expert on Soviet literature and on the works of Mikhail Bulgakov in particular. Her biography of Bulgakov was first published in 1988 and remains the most authoritative and comprehensive study of the writer’s life ever produced. It has received acclaim for the journalistic style in which it is written: the author draws on unpublished manuscripts and early drafts of Bulgakov’s novels to bring the writer to life. She also explores archive documents and memoirs written by some of Bulgakov’s contemporaries so as to construct a comprehensive and nuanced portrait of the writer and his life and times. Marietta Chudakova casts light on Bulgakov’s life with an unrivalled eye for detail and a huge amount of affection for the writer and his works. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Life and Times will be of particular interest to international researchers studying Mikhail Bulgakov’s life and works, and is recommended to a broader audience worldwide. Translated from the Russian by Huw Davies Published by arrangement with ELKOST Intl. Literary Agency Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia Introduction by J.A.E. Curtis Proofreading by Kevin Bridge Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor
Download or read book Tefil written by Rafał Wojasiński and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2024-06-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rafał Wojasiński’s new engaging masterpiece Tefil, we come across a curious – and eerie – situation. A young man named Rozmaryn finds a photograph depicting his mother in the company of a stranger. He lost both his parents at an early age, and never even knew his mother. So he sets off in search of that stranger, and this leads him to one of the most articulate, yet unsettling and possibly mentally handicapped characters as can be found anywhere in literature: Tefil. A balding and somewhat odiferous inhabitant of a garret flat in a sleepy town somewhere in Poland, never married, Tefil, who spent his working years as a village factotum, now exists as something of a self-interested Oxfam bin collecting the clothes of the dead. He also goes to extreme lengths to avoid paying back insignificant debts and cadging pastries, coffee, and sometimes alcoholic dinners, from passers-by to whom he attaches himself like a tick. He also philosophises, disparaging the sense of human life, and singing a paean to “all-conquering mould”, which is the only living creature that cannot be destroyed (supposedly, it even survives being eaten and digested), and which is fated to overcome – to consume – all other life, including man and his civilisation. How does that make us feel, as human beings ourselves? Rafał Wojasiński’s character is challenging, repulsive, and yet fatally attractive. Like Rozmaryn, we cannot tear ourselves away from his rushing stream of words and ideas, which fascinate us while filling us with existential dread. But is Tefil serious? Or is he just spilling an unending yarn, talking for the sake of hearing his unquestionably spellbinding voice? One hopes it is the latter, and it just might be. For Tefil is a poetic novel, something in the line of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; something of a literary equivalent to absolute music and non-representational painting. Standing before Wojasiński’s puzzling canvas, hearing his dissonant composition through to the end, the reader might be left bewildered – but will certainly not find his time spent with Tefil unrewarding.
Download or read book The 12 Apostles of Russian Law written by Pavel Krasheninnikov and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pavel Krasheninnikov (born 1964) is a prominent Russian politician, state official, and professor of law. He studied at Sverdlovsk School of Law and then did graduate work there. He subsequently taught at the Ural State Law University. In the 1990s he served as an expert on legislation for the Supreme Soviet and worked in senior posts in various state authorities, including as head of Russia’s Ministry of Justice under Boris Yeltsin. He spent a decade as rector of the Russian School of Private Law in Moscow. At present Krasheninnikov is a deputy in the State Duma, and for 18 years he has led the Duma’s legislative committee. Krasheninnikov took part in the drawing up of a new Civil Code and other major legislation in modern Russia. He has played an active role in drafting and introducing legal reforms. He is responsible for over 150 publications in the field of private and public law, as well as legal theory and history. Krasheninnikov has authored a series of works in which he has traced the emergence and development of law as a key system for regulating interpersonal and social relations and as one of the sources of authority. His book The 12 Apostles of Law first saw publication in Russia in 2016 and is dedicated to the great legal minds who, through their scholarship and legislative activity, changed Russia’s law, government, and society over two centuries. For over thirty years Krasheninnikov has studied the lives and work of the men depicted in this book, and he was fortunate to personally work with four of them.
Download or read book Robinson written by Aram Pachyan and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robinson is the first book by Aram Pachyan, which earned him the highest governmental award in Armenia, The Presidential Prize for Literature. The volume is made up of 16 short stories; each story is like a small but sharp painting of various characters. The faces in these paintings look very familiar, like someone you know, or someone hiding deep inside you. An inescapable loneliness of people in the modern world is the main topic of the stories by Pachyan. 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 The Flying Dutchman written by Anatoly Kudryavitsky and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-07-09 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some time in the 1970s, Konstantin Alpheyev, a well-known Russian musicologist, finds himself in trouble with the KGB, the Russian secret police, after the death of his girlfriend, for which one of their officers may have been responsible. He has to flee from the city and to go into hiding. He rents an old house located on the bank of a big Russian river, and lives there like a recluse observing nature and working on his new book about Wagner. The house, a part of an old barge, undergoes strange metamorphoses rebuilding itself as a medieval schooner, and Alpheyev begins to identify himself with the Flying Dutchman. Meanwhile, the police locate his new whereabouts and put him under surveillance. A chain of strange events in the nearby village makes the police officer contact the KGB, and the latter figure out who the new tenant of the old house actually is.
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.
Download or read book Russian Style written by Julie A. Cassiday and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2023 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the two decades after the turn of the millennium, Vladimir Putin's control over Russian politics and society grew at a steady pace. As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender, Putin's Russia moved in the opposite direction, remolding the performance of Russian citizenship according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie A. Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin's leadership. However, while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin's neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state's mandate of heteronormativity. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin's Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin's regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. This smart and lively study provides critical, nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Putin's first two decades in power.
Download or read book The Revenge of the Foxes written by Ak Welsapar and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moscow, during the collapse of the Soviet system: In a hospital, young people awaiting heart operations and possible death, live just for today with mischief-making and even love affairs, under the stringent gaze of the old matron, Baba Nastya. Here one of the patients, a young Turkmen, meets a Greek Comsomol boy, a Russian Stalinist with a ‘robotic’ heart, and the lovely but tragic Mary. To whom does the future belong – to the soulless robots or the poetical souls?
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 Combustions written by Srđan Srdić and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Srđan Srdić’s collection of short stories, Combustions, establishes this author’s position as one of the best prose writers in Serbia and across the region. This book consists of nine stories in which the author brings the reader face to face with the seamy side of everyday life, where, somewhere in the province, hopelessness and despair of the endless Balkan transition meet one another in the most radical way. Devoid of illusions of social engagement and narrative tricks, Srdić linguistically demolishes the present and its numerous platitudes, either liberal or conservative, with which we have been overwhelmed for years, to the extent that we can no longer discern the depth of the twilight zone in which we live. Srdić’s stories are linguistically flawless, authentic and emblematically recognizable. The ironic distance that Srdić uses to talk about his characters, which are often socially marginalized and in disproportion to self-perception, combined with exquisite attention to detail, associativity and a number of intertextual references, makes this collection of short stories a genuine masterpiece, which uncompromisingly brings into light the bizarre quality of contemporary life.
