Dacha Tales


Book Description

Dacha Tales: Life in the Russian Hinterland is the author’s first book in the travel genre. Readers of Zalesova’s novels often asked whether she drew on her own and her family’s experience to write them. The answer was ‘yes and no.’ In Dacha Tales, she says directly that the stories retold are autobiographical, recounting her adventures recreating as a pensioner the joyful life in the countryside that she enjoyed in her childhood and adolescence. The personalities presented are real flesh and blood people: neighbors, friends, acquaintances who embody the folk wisdom and the life experience of contemporary Russia.




Dacha Idylls


Book Description

"Anyone who has spent time in Russia knows the importance of 'going to the dacha.' In this ethnography Melissa Caldwell reveals the mystique of rural life by exploring the social nature of gardening and making food, and Russian relationships to the land. It's truly an innovative study!"--Catherine Wanner, author of Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism "In this engaging ethnography, Melissa Caldwell brilliantly demonstrates what is peculiarly Russian about the dacha, long an object of literary and nostalgic imagining, while simultaneously situating the 'vacation cottage' within larger histories of leisure, consumption, home, and post-socialist transition. A must-read for scholars of Russia or tourism."--Pamela Ballinger, author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans




The Society Tale in Russian Literature


Book Description

This collection of essays is the first book to appear on the society tale in nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Written by a team of British and American scholars, the volume is based on a symposium on the society tale held at the University of Bristol in 1996. The essays examine the development of the society tale in Russian fiction, from its beginnings in the 1820s until its subsumption into the realist novel, later in the century. The contributions presented vary in approach from the text or author based study to the generic or the sociological. Power, gender and discourse theory all feature strongly and the volume should be of considerable interest to students and scholars of nineteenth-century Russian literature. There are essays covering Pushkin, Lermontov, Odoevsky and Tolstoi, as well as more minor writers, and more general and theoretical approaches.




Novels, Tales, Journeys


Book Description

From the award-winning translators: the complete prose narratives of the most acclaimed Russian writer of the Romantic era and one of the world's greatest storytellers. The father of Russian literature, Pushkin is beloved not only for his poetry but also for his brilliant stories, which range from dramatic tales of love, obsession, and betrayal to dark fables and sparkling comic masterpieces, from satirical epistolary tales and romantic adventures in the manner of Sir Walter Scott to imaginative historical fiction and the haunting dreamworld of "The Queen of Spades." The five short stories of The Late Tales of Ivan Petrovich Belkin are lightly humorous and yet reveal astonishing human depths, and his short novel, The Captain's Daughter, has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature.




Summerfolk


Book Description

The dacha is a sometimes beloved, sometimes scorned Russian dwelling. Alexander Pushkin summered in one; Joseph Stalin lived in one for the last twenty years of his life; and contemporary Russian families still escape the city to spend time in them. Stephen Lovell's generously illustrated book is the first social and cultural history of the dacha. Lovell traces the dwelling's origins as a villa for the court elite in the early eighteenth century through its nineteenth-century role as the emblem of a middle-class lifestyle, its place under communist rule, and its post-Soviet incarnation.A fascinating work rich in detail, Summerfolk explores the ways in which Russia's turbulent past has shaped the function of the dacha and attitudes toward it. The book also demonstrates the crucial role that the dacha has played in the development of Russia's two most important cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, by providing residents with a refuge from the squalid and crowded metropolis. Like the suburbs in other nations, the dacha form of settlement served to alleviate social anxieties about urban growth. Lovell shows that the dacha is defined less by its physical location"usually one or two hours" distance from a large city yet apart from the rural hinterland—than by the routines, values, and ideologies of its inhabitants.Drawing on sources as diverse as architectural pattern books, memoirs, paintings, fiction, and newspapers, he examines how dachniki ("summerfolk") have freed themselves from the workplace, cultivated domestic space, and created informal yet intense intellectual communities. He also reflects on the disdain that many Russians have felt toward the dacha, and their association of its lifestyle with physical idleness, private property, and unproductive use of the land. Russian attitudes toward the dacha are, Lovell asserts, constantly evolving. The word "dacha" has evoked both delight in and hostility to leisure. It has implied both the rejection of agricultural labor and, more recently, a return to the soil. In Summerfolk, the dacha is a unique vantage point from which to observe the Russian social landscape and Russian life in the private sphere.




Moscow Tales


Book Description

Presenting stories which represent each layer of the city of Moscow, from the centre of power to the outer rings of desolate estates and tumbledown shacks, this fascinating collection offers a lively and varied portrait in fiction of Russia's mysterious capital city. The collection includes works by Russian authors ranging from Anton Chekhov and Yuri Koval to Larisa Miller and Marina Boroditskaia, collating nineteeth- and twentieth-century tales, as well those written by contemporary authors. The stories are intriguingly varied --an account of life in the city's infamous high security prison, a tale of a lady with a supernatural gift for repairing household devices, the story of another pitiful lost dog who nearly joins the Moscow Circus -- and together they shed light on the changing nature of Moscow society across the centuries. The next instalment in a series of successful translated anthologies of stories set in and around a particular European City. Moscow Tales combines two genres, travel writing and literary fiction and provides an insight into the lives of those who live in Moscow or have written about it.




Seasoned Socialism


Book Description

This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.




Chekhov and His Russia


Book Description

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Anton Čexov as a Master of Story-Writing


Book Description

No detailed description available for "Anton Čexov as a Master of Story-Writing".




The Story of One Girl


Book Description

The story of the childhood, school years, and early career of the great Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova, her struggles, her victories, and her search for her own unique artistic identity.




Recent Books