Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk And Other Stories

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk And Other Stories
Author: Nikolai Leskov
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2015-08-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0241199816

Five great stories from one of the most quintessentially Russian of writers, Nikolai Leskov. In the best of Leskov's stories, as in almost no others apart from those of Gogol, we can hear the voice of nineteenth-century Russia. An outsider by birth and instinct, Leskov is one of the most undeservedly neglected figures in Russian literature. He combined a profoundly religious spirit with a fascination for crime, an occasionally lurid imagination and a great love for the Russian vernacular. This volume includes five of his greatest stories, including the masterful Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was born in 1831 in Gorokhovo, Oryol Province and was orphaned early. In 1860 he became a journalist and moved to Petersburg where he published his first story. He subsequently wrote a number of folk legends and Christmas tales, along with a few anti-nihilistic novels which resulted in isolation from the literary circles of his day. He died in 1895. David McDuff is a translator of Russian and Nordic literature. His translations of nineteenth and twentieth century Russian prose classics (including works by Dostoyevsky,Tolstoy, Bely and Babel) are published by Penguin.

The Enchanted Wanderer

The Enchanted Wanderer
Author: Nikolai Leskov
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0307388875

Nikolai Leskov's writing exploded the conventions of nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Here is the other Russia, mythical and untamed: an uneasy synthesis of Orthodoxy and Old Believers, a land populated by soldiers and monks, serfs and princes, Tartars and gypsies—a vast country brimming with the promise of magic. These seventeen tales, some rooted in the oral tradition, others cast as sophisticated anecdotes, are all told in the voices of storytellers addressing their audience—allowing us, as readers, to join a group of listeners. Innovative in form and rich in wordplay, the narratives unfurl in startlingly modern ways. The great gift of this new translation allows us to hear all the nuances of Leskov’s brilliant language.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Author: Nikolai Leskov
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681374900

A new collection of the renowned Russian writer's best short work, including a masterful translation of the famous title story. Nikolai Leskov is the strangest of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to the oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin's great essay "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the strange, melancholy, but also worldly-wise yarns of an older, slower era that Leskov remained in touch with. The title story is a tale of illicit love and multiple murder that could easily find its way into a Scottish ballad and did go on to become the most popular of Dmitri Shostakovich's operas. The other stories, all but one newly translated, present the most focused and finely rendered collection of this indispensable writer currently available in English.

The Enchanted Wanderer

The Enchanted Wanderer
Author: Nikolaĭ Semenovich Leskov
Publisher:
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1987
Genre:
ISBN: 9780233980997

Written over the course of Leskov' s career, each story in The Enchanted Wanderer elucidates the very essence of the human condition; themes of love, despair, loneliness, and revenge are explored against the backdrop of nineteenth-century working-class Russia. Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.

The Wanderer

The Wanderer
Author:
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141393750

Part of a new series Legends from the Ancient North, The Wanderer tells the classic tales that influenced JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings 'So the company of men led a careless life, All was well with them: until One began To encompass evil, an enemy from hell. Grendel they called this cruel spirit...' J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his life studying, translating and teaching the great epic stories of northern Europe, filled with heroes, dragons, trolls, dwarves and magic. He was hugely influential for his advocacy of Beowulf as a great work of literature and, even if he had never written The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, would be recognised today as a significant figure in the rediscovery of these extraordinary tales. Legends from the Ancient North brings together from Penguin Classics five of the key works behind Tolkien's fiction.They are startling, brutal, strange pieces of writing, with an elemental power brilliantly preserved in these translations.They plunge the reader into a world of treachery, quests, chivalry, trials of strength.They are the most ancient narratives that exist from northern Europe and bring us as near as we will ever get to the origins of the magical landscape of Middle-earth (Midgard) which Tolkien remade in the 20th century.

Night of Denial

Night of Denial
Author: Ivan Alekseevich Bunin
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 731
Release: 2006-08-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0810114038

Publisher Description

The Zhivago Affair

The Zhivago Affair
Author: Peter Finn
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307908011

Drawing on newly declassified government files, this is the dramatic story of how a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.” Pasternak believed his novel was unlikely ever to be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an irredeemable assault on the 1917 Revolution. But he thought it stood a chance in the West and, indeed, beginning in Italy, Doctor Zhivago was widely published in translation throughout the world. From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend. Pasternak’s funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of admirers who defied their government to bid him farewell. The example he set launched the great tradition of the writer-dissident in the Soviet Union. In The Zhivago Affair, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée bring us intimately close to this charming, passionate, and complex artist. First to obtain CIA files providing concrete proof of the agency’s involvement, the authors give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War—to a time when literature had the power to stir the world. (With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)

Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

Motorcycles & Sweetgrass
Author: Drew Hayden Taylor
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1039000614

A story of magic, family, a mysterious stranger . . . and a band of marauding raccoons. Otter Lake is a sleepy Anishnawbe community where little happens. Until the day a handsome stranger pulls up astride a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle – and turns Otter Lake completely upside down. Maggie, the Reserve’s chief, is swept off her feet, but Virgil, her teenage son, is less than enchanted. Suspicious of the stranger’s intentions, he teams up with his uncle Wayne – a master of aboriginal martial arts – to drive the stranger from the Reserve. And it turns out that the raccoons are willing to lend a hand.

The Gothic Wanderer

The Gothic Wanderer
Author: Tyler R. Tichelaar
Publisher: Modern History Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1615991387

The Gothic Wanderer Rises Eternal in Popular Literature From the horrors of sixteenth century Italian castles to twenty-first century plagues, from the French Revolution to the liberation of Libya, Tyler R. Tichelaar takes readers on far more than a journey through literary history. The Gothic Wanderer is an exploration of man's deepest fears, his eff orts to rise above them for the last two centuries, and how he may be on the brink finally of succeeding. Tichelaar examines the figure of the Gothic wanderer in such well-known Gothic novels as "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "Frankenstein," and "Dracula," as well as lesser known works like Fanny Burney's "The Wanderer," Mary Shelley's "The Last Man," and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "Zanoni." He also finds surprising Gothic elements in classics like Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan of the Apes." From Matthew Lewis' "The Monk" to Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight," Tichelaar explores a literary tradition whose characters refl ect our greatest fears and deepest hopes. Readers will find here the revelation that not only are we all Gothic wanderers--but we are so only by our own choosing. Acclaim for "The Gothic Wanderer" ""The Gothic Wanderer" shows us the importance of its title figure in helping us to see our own imperfections and our own sometimes contradictory yearnings to be both unique and yet a part of a society. The reader is in for an insightful treat." --Diana DeLuca, Ph.D. and author of Extraordinary Things "Make no mistake about it, The Gothic Wanderer is an important, well researched and comprehensive treatise on some of the world's finest literature." --Michael Willey, author of Ojisan Zanoni Foreword by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Ph.D. Learn more at www.GothicWanderer.com From Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com Literary Criticism: Gothing & Romance Literary Criticism: European - General