Happy Moscow

Happy Moscow
Author: Andrey Platonov
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2012-11-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590175859

An NYRB Classics Original Moscow Chestnova is a bold and glamorous girl, a beautiful parachutist who grew up with the Revolution. As an orphan, she knew tough times—but things are changing now. Comrade Stalin has proclaimed that “Life has become better! Life has become merrier!” and Moscow herself is poised to join the Soviet elite. But her ambitions are thwarted when a freak accident propels her flaming from the sky. A new, stranger life begins. Moscow drifts from man to man, through dance halls, all-night diners, and laboratories in which the secret of immortality is actively being investigated, exploring the endless avenues and vacant spaces of the great city whose name she bears, looking for happiness, somewhere, still. Unpublishable during Platonov’s lifetime, Happy Moscow first appeared in Russian only in 1991. This new edition contains not only a revised translation of Happy Moscow but several related works: a screenplay, a prescient essay about ecological catastrophe, and two short stories in which same characters reappear and the reader sees the mind of an extraordinary writer at work.

A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow
Author: Amor Towles
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2017-01-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1448135508

The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers Soon to be a Showtime/Paramount+ series starring Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov From the number one New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel 'A wonderful book' - Tana French 'This novel is astonishing, uplifting and wise. Don't miss it' - Chris Cleave 'No historical novel this year was more witty, insightful or original' - Sunday Times, Books of the Year '[A] supremely uplifting novel ... It's elegant, witty and delightful - much like the Count himself.' - Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year 'Charming ... shows that not all books about Russian aristocrats have to be full of doom and nihilism' - The Times, Books of the Year On 21 June 1922, Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. But instead of his usual suite, he must now live in an attic room while Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval. Can a life without luxury be the richest of all? A BOOK OF THE DECADE, 2010-2020 (INDEPENDENT) THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A MAIL ON SUNDAY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A DAILY EXPRESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017 ONE OF BILL GATES'S SUMMER READS OF 2019 NOMINATED FOR THE 2018 INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS WEEK AWARD

The Foundation Pit

The Foundation Pit
Author: Andrei Platonov
Publisher: ISCI
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.

Molecular Red

Molecular Red
Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2015-04-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 178168829X

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov. The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.

The Tsar's Happy Occasion

The Tsar's Happy Occasion
Author: Russell E. Martin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2021-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501754858

The Tsar's Happy Occasion shows how the vast, ornate affairs that were royal weddings in early modern Russia were choreographed to broadcast powerful images of monarchy and dynasty. Processions and speeches emphasized dynastic continuity and legitimacy. Fertility rites blended Christian and pre-Christian symbols to assure the birth of heirs. Gift exchanges created and affirmed social solidarity among the elite. The bride performed rituals that integrated herself and her family into the inner circle of the court. Using an array of archival sources, Russell E. Martin demonstrates how royal weddings reflected and shaped court politics during a time of dramatic cultural and dynastic change. As Martin shows, the rites of passage in these ceremonies were dazzling displays of monarchical power unlike any other ritual at the Muscovite court. And as dynasties came and went and the political culture evolved, so too did wedding rituals. Martin relates how Peter the Great first mocked, then remade wedding rituals to symbolize and empower his efforts to westernize Russia. After Peter, the two branches of the Romanov dynasty used weddings to solidify their claims to the throne. The Tsar's Happy Occasion offers a sweeping, yet penetrating cultural history of the power of rituals and the rituals of power in early modern Russia.

Petrified Utopia

Petrified Utopia
Author: Marina Balina
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2011-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857288555

Taken together, these essays redefine the preconceived notion of Soviet happiness as the product of official ideology imposed from above and expressed predominantly through collective experience, and provide evidence that the formation of the concept of individual happiness was not contained by the limitations of important state projects, controlled by state policies and aimed toward the creation of a new society.

Andrey Platonov

Andrey Platonov
Author: Tora Lane
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2020-07-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498547761

This book traces the originality of Andrey Platonov’s vision of the Revolution in readings of his works. It has been common in Platonov scholarship to measure him within the parameters of a political pro et contra the October Revolution and Soviet society, but the proposal of this book is to look for the way in which the writer continuously asked into the disastrous aspects of the implementation of a new proletarian community for what they could tell us about the promise of the Revolution to open up the experience of the world as common. In readings of selected works by Andrei Platonov I follow the development of his chronicle of revolutionary society, and from within it the outline of the forgotten utopian dream of a common world. I bring Platonov into a dialogue with certain questions that arise from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and that were later re-addressed in the works of Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy, related to the experience of the modern world in terms of communality, groundlessness, memory, interiority. I show that Platonov writes the Revolution as an implementation of common being in society that needs to retrieve the forgotten memory of what being in common means.

Casino Moscow

Casino Moscow
Author: Matthew Brzezinski
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2002-07-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0684869772

After awakening from its long communist slumber, Russia in the 1990s was a place where everything and everyone was for sale, and fortunes could be made and lost overnight. Into this free-market maelstrom stepped rookie Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Brzezinski, who was immediately pulled into the mad world of Russian capitalism -- where corrupt bankers and fast-talking American carpetbaggers presided over the biggest boom and bust in financial history. Brzezinski's adventures take him from the solid-gold bathroom fixtures of Moscow's elite, to the last stop on the Trans-Siberian railway, where poverty-stricken citizens must buy water by the pail from the local crime lord, and back to civilization, to stumble into a drunken birthday bash for an ultra-nationalist politico. It's an irreverent, lurid, and hilarious account of one man's tumultuous trek through a capitalist market gone haywire -- and a nation whose uncertain future is marked by boundless hope and foreboding despair.

Sex Work in Contemporary Russia

Sex Work in Contemporary Russia
Author: Emily Schuckman Matthews
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2023-02-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1666915955

Sex Work in Russia weaves together a wide range of materials to examine the figure of the female sex worker in Russia from the early twentieth century to the present day. This book offers readers both an expansive and nuanced discussion of the significance of this archetypal female who appears with remarkable frequency in literature, film, and other cultural productions. Emily Schuckman Matthews explores the ways in which the fictional sex worker (and her real-life counterpart) has become a symbolic representative of social and moral instability, economic volatility, political, social, and ideological revolutions, and changing concepts of gender, sexuality, and the nation itself. Focus is given to the movement of the female sex worker from marginal foil to a hero in her own right, even finding a voice of her own in recent years. Works featuring this alluring and complex figure reveal critical insights into the changing position of women and other marginalized people in a volatile Russia.