First published in 1998, this deeply engaging volume describes the ‘great transformation’ of our time. While transformation, it is definitely not a transition to the market economy, civil society and democratic rule. Instead, this book maps the growth of the economic jungle, clan society and a corrupted, criminalised state. Capitalists but no capitalism. Watching Warsaw, Prague and Budapest, one should not forget about Zaporizhzhya. After this book, one cannot.
First published in 1998, this deeply engaging volume describes the ‘great transformation’ of our time. While transformation, it is definitely not a transition to the market economy, civil society and democratic rule. Instead, this book maps the growth of the economic jungle, clan society and a corrupted, criminalised state. Capitalists but no capitalism. Watching Warsaw, Prague and Budapest, one should not forget about Zaporizhzhya. After this book, one cannot.
Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia's autobiography, originally published in 1938, is a rare and fascinating historical account of Jewish childhood and young adult life in Tsarist Russia. At a time when the vast majority of Jews resided in small market towns in the Pale of Settlement, Vygodskaia liberated herself from that world and embraced the day-to-day rhythms, educational activities, and new intellectual opportunities in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Her story offers a unique glimpse of Jewish daily life that is rarely documented in public sources—of neighborly interactions, children's games and household rituals, love affairs and emotional outbursts, clothing customs, and leisure time. Most first-person narratives of this kind reconstruct an isolated and self-contained Jewish world, but The Story of a Life uniquely describes the unprecedented social opportunities, as well as the many political and personal challenges, that young Jewish women and men experienced in the Russia of the 1870s and 1880s. In addition to their artful translation, Eugene M. Avrutin and Robert H. Greene thoroughly explicate this historical context in their introduction.
Providing a unique glimpse into the domestic life of Russia's nobility in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Days of a Russian Noblewoman combines a rare memoir and a diary, now translated into English for the first time. Anna Labzina was relatively well educated by the standards of her day, and she traveled widely through the Russian empire. Yet, unlike most writers of her time, she writes primarily as a dutiful, if inwardly rebellious, daughter and wife, reflecting on the onerous roles assigned to women in a male-centered society. Labzina was married young to Alexander Karamyshev, who, while well regarded in political and scholarly circles of his day, proved to be brutish and abusive at home. A "Russian Voltairian," he professed atheism and free love. His unbridled behavior caused Labzina much grief, which she vividly recalls in her memoir. Because she moved among aristocratic circles, her reminiscences bring readers face to face with celebrated figures of politics and literature, including the Empress Catherine the Great and the "Radiant Prince" Grigorii Potemkin. As a pious and charitable woman, Labzina also speaks for others who rarely had a voice in literature: serfs, prisoners, and political exiles. Labzina wrote both her memoir and her diary during her second marriage, to Alexander Labzin, a leader in Russian Freemasonry and in the movement for religious revival. At the same time, she became actively involved in the spiritual life of his lodge, the Dying Sphinx. Her account of her spiritual development and her social sphere offer unparalleled insights into male and female sensibilities of the time.
Presented the actual diary of Anna Anahit Paitian, an American-Armenian novelist, poetess, author, and scholar. The diary includes the real events of the author's life, which have historical significance, showing the collapse of the Soviet Communist civilization and its aftermath. The true nature of the atheist society is exposed in dept. It required gigantic efforts for an individual living in that society to preserve the human integrity. The USSR atheistic civilization was a paranormal reality, in which the mediated evolution of natural human can take an unpredictable course. What was once thoroughly controllable, can outgrow over time into a formidable universal calamity out of control.
The stories in Anushka were originally published in literary magazines around the country. They focus on the relationship between internal and external life. In "Mending Heads" a 60's activist betrayed by her psychiatrist returns at mid-life to confront the aging man. "They're Coming to Get My Aunt Sis" has sixteen-year-old Betsy standing in for her father as authorities close in on her mentally-ill aunt. In "Anushka," a once-respected marine biologist sailing in a ship on the Bering Sea refuses to help a young Pole forcing the young man to take matters into his own hands. At a wake, a woman trying to escape her past confronts it in "History Major." "Private Charity" spoofs the view that private means will provide for those in need.
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