Reflections on the Russian Soul

Reflections on the Russian Soul
Author: Dmitry S. Likhachev
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2000-01-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9633864925

This compelling and often traumatic book is the memoir of one of the most important figures in modern Russian history, Dmitry S. Likhachev, revered as ‘a guardian of national culture’. Reflections on the Russian Soul is an incredible account of an intellectual’s turbulent journey through twentieth century Russia. Likhachev re-counts the fortunes of people with whom he came into contact and reproduces the air of passed years in Russia. Likhachev vividly portrays his childhood years in St. Petersburg and continues into his student life at Leningrad University that led to an agonizing period of imprisonment and near death. He describes how a harmless prank caught the attention of the Secret Police, resulting in his exile and confinement within the infamous prison island of Solovki. He describes his first-hand experience of brutality in prison during the early Stalin years and the incident that not only saved him but also haunted him for the rest of his life. He reflects on the years after his release from prison and the events leading up to the Second World War. His powerful recollection of the blockade of Leningrad provides the reader with a horrific insight into the harsh effects of war, hunger and survival. Lichachev goes on to describe post-war Russia and how his own livelihood developed from literary editor to a return to Leningrad University as Professor of History. This compelling autobiography finishes with Likhachev’s poignant return to Solovki as a free man.

Memories

Memories
Author: Teffi
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 159017951X

WINNER OF THE 2018 READ RUSSIA PRIZE AND THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BEST BOOK IN TRANSLATION IN 2017 Considered Teffi’s single greatest work, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea is a deeply personal account of the author’s last months in Russia and Ukraine, suffused with her acute awareness of the political currents churning around her, many of which have now resurfaced. In 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Teffi, whose stories and journalism had made her a celebrity in Moscow, was invited to read from her work in Ukraine. She accepted the invitation eagerly, though she had every intention of returning home. As it happened, her trip ended four years later in Paris, where she would spend the rest of her life in exile. None of this was foreseeable when she arrived in German-occupied Kiev to discover a hotbed of artistic energy and experimentation. When Kiev fell several months later to Ukrainian nationalists, Teffi fled south to Odessa, then on to the port of Novorossiysk, from which she embarked at last for Constantinople. Danger and death threaten throughout Memories, even as the book displays the brilliant style, keen eye, comic gift, and deep feeling that have made Teffi one of the most beloved of twentieth-century Russian writers.

Russia in War and Revolution

Russia in War and Revolution
Author: Gary M. Hamburg
Publisher: Hoover Press
Total Pages: 770
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817923667

Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff (1885&–1971) led a remarkable life in the shadows of history. This book presents his memoirs for the first time, translated and annotated by his granddaughter Tanya A. Cameron. Born into a noble family, Olferieff was a Russian career military officer who observed firsthand key events of the early twentieth century, including the 1905&–7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Olferieff wrestles with moral and political questions, wondering whether his own advantages could be justified—and whether, if born a peasant, he might have thrown himself into the revolution. As Gary Hamburg writes in an illuminating companion essay, Olferieff wrote "to understand himself and to record his broken life for posterity" as a privileged observer of a bloody, historically pivotal era.

The Russian Memoir

The Russian Memoir
Author: Beth Holmgren
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0810119307

The essays in this volume seek to appreciate the literary construction of the memoir, with its dual agendas of individualized expression and reliable reportage, and explore its functions as interpretive history, social modelling, and political expression in Russian culture. The memoirs under scrutiny range widely, including those of the private person (Princess Natalia Dolgorukaia), sophisticated high culture writers (Nikolai Zabolotskii, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky), cultural critics and facilitators (Lidiia Ginzburg, Avdot'ia Panaeva), political dissidents (Evgeniia Ginzburg, Elena Bonner), and popular artists (filmmaker Elidar Riazanov). It examines each memoir for its aesthetic and rhetorical features as well as its cultural circumstances. In mapping the memoir's social and historical significance, the essays consider a wide range of influences and issues, including the specific impact of the author's class, gender, ideology, and life experience on his/her witnessing of Russian culture and society.

Bride and Groom

Bride and Groom
Author: Alisa Ganieva
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1941920608

Runner-up for 2015 Russian Booker Prize. From one of the most exciting voices in modern Russian literature, Alisa Ganieva, comes Bride and Groom, the tumultuous love story of two young city-dwellers who meet when they return home to their families in rural Dagestan. When traditional family expectations and increasing religious and cultural tension threaten to shatter their bond, Marat and Patya struggle to overcome obstacles determined to keep them apart, while fate seems destined to keep them together—until the very end. Alisa Ganieva (b. 1985) grew up in Makhachkala, Dagestan. Her literary debut, the novella Salam, Dalgat!, published under a male pseudonym, won the prestigious Debut Prize in 2009. Her debut novel, The Mountain and the Wall (Deep Vellum, 2015) was shortlisted for all of Russia's major literary awards and has been translated into seven languages. Bride and Groom is her second novel, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Russian Booker Prize upon its publication in Russia. Ganieva currently lives in Moscow, where she works as a journalist and literary critic. Dr. Carol Apollonio is Professor of the Practice of Russian at Duke University. Her most recent literary translations include Alisa Ganieva's debut novel, The Mountain and the Wall (Deep Vellum, 2015). She was awarded the Russian Ministry of Culture's Chekhov Medal in 2010, and she currently serves as President of the North American Dostoevsky Society.

The Life of a Russian Woman Doctor

The Life of a Russian Woman Doctor
Author: Anna Bek
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2004-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253111173

The Life of a Russian Woman Doctor by Anna Bek (1869--1954) yields rich insights into the lives of a generation of Russian women who lived at a time of revolutionary change, extraordinary challenges, and unprecedented opportunities. Written in a lively and compelling style, Anna Bek's memoir reveals not only the experiences but also the motives and values of women who sought education, independence, and self-sufficiency, the obstacles they encountered, and the influences of other women and men on their lives. This engrossing memoir also engages the special context of Siberian geography and history -- the vast distances and isolation, the heterogeneous population of settlers, exiles, and convicts, the closeness and interdependence of families and communities, and the deep appreciation of nature. This book offers a rewarding excursion into Siberian social history and an intimate acquaintance with two exceptional individuals of great charm and courage -- Anna Bek and her American editor, Anne D. Rassweiler.

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel
Author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2017-02-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101993510

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. “From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction

Russian Tattoo

Russian Tattoo
Author: Elena Gorokhova
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2015-01-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451689845

Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing From the bestselling author of A Mountain of Crumbs, a “brilliant and illuminating” (BookPage) portrait of mothers and daughters that reaches from Cold War Russia to modern-day New Jersey to show how the ties that hold you back can also teach you how to start over. Elena Gorokhova moves to the US in her twenties to join her American husband and to break away from her mother, a mirror image of her Soviet Motherland: overbearing, protective, and difficult to leave. Before the birth of Elena’s daughter, her mother comes to help care for the baby and stays for twenty-four years, ordering everyone to eat soup and wear a hat, just as she did in Leningrad. Russian Tattoo is the story of a unique balancing act and a family struggle: three generations of strong women with very different cultural values, all living under the same roof and battling for control. As Elena strives to bridge the gap between the cultures of her past and present and find her place in a new world, she comes to love the fierce resilience of her Soviet mother when she recognizes it in her American daughter. “Gorokhova writes about her life with a novelist’s gift,” says The New York Times, and her second memoir is filled with empathy, insight, and humor.