This anthology brings together key plays from the Crooked Mirror, a leading Silver Age Russian cabaret, with short biographies of their authors and robust commentary and annotations to trace the theater’s artistic and ideological evolution.
The Balkans have been so troubled by violence and misunderstanding that we have the verb “balkanize,” meaning to break up into smaller, warring components. While some of the region’s artists and thinkers have invariably fallen into nationalistic tendencies, the twenty-two prominent authors represented here, from the erstwhile Yugoslavia and its neighbors Albania and Bulgaria, have chosen to attempt to bridge these divides.
A Herzen Reader presents in English for the first time one hundred essays and editorials by the radical Russian thinker Alexander Herzen (1812–1870). Herzen wrote most of these pieces for The Bell, a revolutionary newspaper he launched with the poet Nikolai Ogaryov in London in 1857.
Though published a decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, The Tragic Menagerie possesses a sensibility that is modern in its descriptions of a childhood of passionate affections and unsettling revelations....
Patterned on the novels of the Brontë sisters, Antonina is a poignant account of a young Russian whose life is shaped by the cruel neglect of her stepparents, the financial ruin of her father and husband, and—the centerpiece of the novel—her failed love affair with a sensitive but weak young man.
A classic of Soviet realism, Time, Forward! captures the enthusiasm and optimism of the first Five-Year Plan in its portrayal of the construction of Magnitogorsk, an enormous metallurgical...
One of the liveliest novels to come out of Russia in recent years, The Soul of a Patriot is, on the surface, a series of amusing letters written at the death of Leonid Brezhnev. The fictional...
