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The only full-length biography of the founder of the Nobel Prize. Few documents have had a more enduring influence on our century than Alfred Nobel's last will and testament, for these handwritten sheets established the most coveted and prestigious awards on earth. The Nobel Prizes represent glory and world stature, and are the stuff of immortality. Yet the man whose name they bear has been lost to near obscurity. As Kenne Fant shows in this fascinating biography, Alfred Nobel's life contained fierce and troubling paradoxes. He invented dynamite and revolutionized the technology of destruction, yet his dreams of a disarmed world inspired him to create the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the most powerful men of his time, Nobel was viewed by some as the model of success and entrepreneurial drive; to his workers, he was an enlightened and scrupulously honest employer in an age of heartless exploitation. Others, however, blamed him for the accidents caused by his inventions and labeled him the "merchant of death." Victor Hugo called him "Europe's richest vagabond" because he moved about too restlessly. Harassed by imitators, sycophants, and frauds, and struggling continuously with bureaucracies and patent offices (only Thomas Edison surpassed him in the number of patents obtained), Nobel was often desperately lonely. Making extensive use of Nobel's letters and writing, Fan's portrait reveals Nobel in all his aspects--industrialist, pacifist, arms manufacturer, and poet--and does full justice to a compelling and visionary figure whose name will resonate for generations. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Contains a translation of the first five parts of Tikhiĭ Don (Book 1, parts 1-3 and Book 2, parts 4 & 5), which are arranged as four parts in this translation. The remaining three parts (Book 3, part 6 and Book 4, parts 7 & 8) were completed 1929-1940 and translated in 1940 as The Don flows home to the sea. --Murphy, in Sholokhov, 1996.

First published in Italy in 1957 amidst international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Here is a masterful chronicle of its outbreak and the consequences: army revolts, irrational killings, starvation, epidemics, Communist Party inquisitions. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times.

This book, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, is designed to guide readers through Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's classic story of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. An introduction places the novel and its author within Russian history and literature, and essays by scholars offer opinion and analysis of Pasternak's method and thought. Finally, there is correspondence relating to the novel and a bibliography chosen by the editor.

Gates of Mystery will enable Westerners to experience something of much more than the pleasure of admiring visual beauty. By contemplating the legacy of a great medieval artistic tradition, at least a part of the perfect harmony to which Russian artists and patrons aspired can be recovered. The Russian artistic tradition - springing from Byzantine roots - is here portrayed in its fullness, spanning the whole of the medieval Russian period, from the appearance of a definable Christian state in the eleventh century until the reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century swept away traditions that by then seemed timeless. Although the main concentration is on religious art - and particularly that of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - the wide range is shown here in over 100 full-colour plates, including some of the greatest works of the period. With extended essays on both the historical background and on particular strands of Russian art (such as embroidery and icon painting) Gates of Mystery is an ideal introduction to a tradition almost unknown in the modern West.

A much-neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at the forefront of the Russian Realists. Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal experience, these powerful, evocative stories are set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia of his youth, in the countries that he visited and in France, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. In the title story, for example, a family's tour of fashionable European resorts comes to an unexpected end; 'Late Hour' describes an old man's return to the little Russian town in the steppes that he has not seen since his early youth; while 'Mitya's Love' explores the darker emotional reverberations of sexual experience. Throughout his stories there is a sense of the precariousness of existence, an omnipresent awareness of the impermanence of human aspirations and achievements.

The heartbreaking story of the love affair between Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, and Olga Ivinskaya--the true tragedy behind the timeless classic, and a harrowing look at how the Russian government has treated dissidents When Stalin came into power in 1924, the Communist government began persecuting dissident writers. Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak--whose novel-in-progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet--he persecuted Boris's mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris's affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga's role in Boris's writing process. Twice Olga was sentenced to work in Siberian labor camps, where she was interrogated about the book Boris was writing, but she refused to betray the man she loved. When Olga was released from the gulags, she assumed that Boris would leave his wife for her but, trapped by his family's expectations and his own weak will, he never did.  Drawing on previously neglected family sources and original interviews, Anna Pasternak explores this hidden act of moral compromise by her great-uncle, and restores to history the passionate affair that inspired and animated Doctor Zhivago. Devastated that Olga suffered on his behalf and frustrated that he could not match her loyalty to him, Boris instead channeled his thwarted passion for Olga into the love story in Doctor Zhivago.  Filled with the rich detail of Boris's secret life, Lara unearths a moving love story of courage, loyalty, suffering, drama, and loss, and casts a new light on the legacy of Doctor Zhivago.

The Marquis de Custine's record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world's most fascinating and troubled countries. It is also a wonderful piece of travel writing. Custine, who met with people in all walks of life, including the Czar himself, offers vivid descriptions of St. Petersburg and Moscow, of life at court and on the street, and of the impoverished Russian countryside. But together with a wealth of sharply delineated incident and detail, Custine's great work also presents an indelible picture--roundly denounced by both Czarist and Communist regimes--of a country crushed by despotism and "intoxicated with slavery." Letters from Russia, here published in a new edition prepared by Anka Muhlstein, the author of the Goncourt Prize-winning biography of Custine, stands with Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a profound and passionate encounter with historical forces that are still very much at work in the world today.

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer of the twentieth century to be award the Nobel Prize in literature. Like many other Russian writers, he emigrated after the Revolution and never returned to his homeland; The Life of Arseniev is the major work of his émigré period. In ways similar to Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Bunin's novel powerfully evokes the atmosphere of Russia in the decades before the Revolution and illuminates those Russian literary and cultural traditions eradicated in the Soviet era. This first full English-language edition updates earlier translations, taking as its source the version Bunin revised in 1952, and including an introduction and annotations by Andrew Baruch Wachtel.

The title of this book is The Life of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (Stanford Slavic Studies) and it was written by Lazar Fleishman (Editor). This particular edition is in a Paperback format. This book was published date on Feb 28, 2009. It was published by Berkeley Slavic Specialties and has a total of 210 pages in the book. The 10 digit ISBN is 1572010800 and the 13 digit ISBN is 9781572010802.

History on a grand scale-an enchanting masterpiece that explores the making of one of the world's most vibrant civilizations A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, internationally renowned historian Orlando Figes does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg-a "window on the West"-and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself-its character, spiritual essence, and destiny. He skillfully interweaves the great works-by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall-with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from foodand drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world. Figes's characters range high and low: the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the Kingdom of God, as well as the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner's wife.Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the spirit of "Russianness" is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory-a powerful force that unified a vast country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state.

An attempt to interpret and appraise the work of Boris Pasternak as lyrical and narrative poet, writer of prose fiction, and verse translator (notably from Shakespeare). Pasternak belonged to an unusually gifted generation of Russian poets who began writing in the years that preceded the First World War and the Russian revolution of 1917. Henry Gifford discusses Pasternak's choice of vocation, and then examines the poetry and stories of the 1920s and 1930s, his work as translator, his two autobiographies, the novel that brought him world fame and much personal anguish, Doctor Zhivago, his late poems and his unfinished play, The Blind Beauty. Pasternak is seen in relation to his most eminent contemporaries among the Russian poets, and to the common crisis they had to face. All the poetry quoted in Russian has a plain prose translation. This critical study is not intended only for the specialist student of Russian literature: it should have an appeal for all readers who are concerned about the survival of poetry in the present age.

The 25 poems from Pasternak's masterpiece Doctor Zhivago are followed by a masterful critique of their function in the novel and their value as poetry

"This new and enlarged version of Readings in Russian Civilization is the result of fairly extensive revisions. There are now 72 instead of 64 items; 20 of the selections are new. The first volume has undergone the least change with 3 new items, of which 2 appear in English for the first time. In the second volume there are 6 new items; all of them appear in English for the first time. The third volume has undergone the greatest revision, with 11 new items, of which 6 are newly translated from the Russian. It is the editor's hope that items left out in the new edition will not be sorely missed, and that the new selections will turn out to be useful and illuminating. The aim, throughout, has been to cover areas of knowledge and periods which had been neglected in the first edition, and to include topics which are important in the study of the Russian past and present. "The bibliographical headnotes have been enlarged, with the result that there are now approximately twice as many entries as in the old edition. New citations include not only works which have appeared since 1963, but also older books and articles which have come to the editor's attention."—From the Editor's Preface ". . . a judicious combination of seminal works and more recent commentaries that achieves the editor's purpose of stimulating curiosity and developing a point of view."—C. Bickford O'Brien, The Russian Review "These three volumes cover quite well the main periods of Russian civilization. The choice of the articles and other material is made by a competent and unbiased scholar."—Ivan A. Lopatin, Professor of Asian and Slavic Studies, University of Southern California

Russia is a great country--both in terms of size and its achievements. It is the largest country in the world and, perhaps, the richest one as well, if one counts all its natural resources combined. The Russian population is well educated and its sciences and technology are quite advanced. It is also a country with political, legal, and economic systems similar to those in Western Europe and North America. What then prevents it from joining the community of Western democratic societies? What makes it always slide back into the habitual mode of authoritarianism, nationalism, and permeating corruption even when formal democratic institutions and structures are installed? Why does it stubbornly resist any attempts to promote democracy and liberalism? Is it because some curse hangs over the country and it always ends up in the hands of a bad government? The author of this book is convinced that the Russian government is just a derivative of the entire population--the entire culture. The book is thus devoted to Russian culture in comparison with Western cultures and the United States in particular. The author begins this juxtaposition at the dawn of Russian history--the Christianization of Russia in the late tenth century. Religion played a tremendous role in shaping Russian tradition from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. Choosing Greek Orthodoxy Russia made the first and decisive step away from Western Christianity inheriting the Byzantine kind of authoritarianism and banning not only the religious doctrine but also all knowledge coming from the West including Latin. The author also demonstrates how serfdom and the agricultural commune, which lasted virtually into the twentieth century, fostered the culture of collectivism, nationalism, and legal nihilism. The book's last part explores the psychology of Russian perceptions of the United States--a crucial factor in the relationships between the two countries. Russian culture, the author contends, persists due to inculcating children during the early childhood socialization, thus passing values and myths from generation to generation. This book represents a truly interdisciplinary project employing ideas and research results from such disciplines as cultural and psychological anthropology, social psychology, psychology of child development, sociology, semiology, law, and history of Russia and Russian religion.

'I remember Moscow in disarray-the smoke and fire of explosions above the cupolas, the glint of the Kremlin eagles shining out of the black night, the flashing of crosses and towers' Fleeing amid the chaos of the 1917 revolutions and subsequent Civil War, many Russian writers went on to settle in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere. In exile, they worked as taxi drivers, labourers and film extras, and wrote some of the most brilliant and imaginative works of Russian literature. This new collection includes stories by the most famous emigre writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin, and introduces powerful lesser known voices, some of whom have never been available in English before. Exploring displacement, loss and new beginnings, these pieces also return obsessively to the Russia that has been left behind - whether as dream or nightmare. Edited by Bryan Karetnyk

In ihrer russischsprachigen Studie geht Tat'jana V. Marcenko den bisher kaum erforschten Hintergrunden der Verleihung bzw. Nichtverleihung des Nobelpreises an russische Autoren der ersten Halfte des 20. Jahrhunderts nach. Warum wurden Tolstoj oder Gorkij ubergangen? Wie wirkte sich der Antagonismus von Exil- und Sowjetliteratur aus? Wurden Exilautoren wie Ivan Bunin bevorzugt? Welche Rolle spielten einflussreiche Koryphaen wie Thomas Mann oder Romain Rolland im Hintergrund? Welches Bild der russischen Literatur hatte man in Westeuropa? Zahlreiche neue Archivfunde ermoglichen erstmals fundierte Antworten auf diese und ahnliche Fragen. Durch grundliche Recherchen wird eine ausserst spannende Geschichte vor und vor allem hinter den Kulissen der internationalen Literaturszene enthullt.

This second volume of Viktor Lazarev's studies makes available a comprehensive selection of his papers on the history of early Russian art, principally fresco and panel painting. Most of the articles gathered in this collection were written between 1953 and 1971. Though they are grouped under the title 'Russian art' they are concerned with the art of a far larger community. All the objects discussed by Lazarev in this volume were produced for the Russian church, but not necessarily by Russians or even on Russian soil. The art discussed in these articles belongs, first and foremost, to a Christian tradition. The majority of these studies have previously been published in Russian, and their translation here into English makes them accessible for the first time to most western art historians. Dr Jana Howlett has contributed an Preface assessing the life and work of Viktor Lazarev.

This is the second book of poems of Joseph Brodsky and the first composed by the poet himself. It is considered the result of the early works of the poet.