Russian Books

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford World's Classics)

Alexander Pushkin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A fabulous translation, fabulous poetry 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I came to this book by way of reading Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglass Hofstadter, and therefore I was expecting a sparkling and smooth translation of Pushkin. I was not disappointed in the least. The rhymes are wonderful and the syllable counts and meter are almost always perfect. I fully understand what Hofstadter meant when he said that after reading Falen's translation one gets the true sense of having read the original (this despite my not reading Russian). I recommend this heartily for anyone wanting to read this classic of Russian literature.

Editorial Review:

Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Somehow a survivor 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Akhmatova was one of the few unrepentant Acemist poets to survive Russia's Bolshevik revolution and subsequant Stalinist takeover and purges. She was seen by authorities as a dangerous element, related to the pre-revolutionary order. Somehow, even as her fellow poets - including friend Osip Mandlestam and husband Nikolay Gumilov - were executed, exiled, sent to camps, or fled, she managed to survive - outliving Stalin himself. Her poems range from the early tales of love and unrequitation, to the tormented later works such as Requium - a harrowing dedication to the victoms of Stalinism. Her use of words is fantastic - the reader can truly feel her presence. This collection is very comprehensive, and well-translted from the original Russian. Definately worth the $21.

Editorial Review:

Initially published in 1990, when the New York Times Book Review named it one of fourteen "Best Books of the Year," Judith Hemschemeyer's translation of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova is the definitive edition, and has sold over 13,000 copies, making it one of the most successful poetry titles of recent years.

This reissued and revised printing features a new biographical essay as well as expanded notes to the poems, both by Roberta Reeder, project editor and author of Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (St. Martin's Press, 1994). Encyclopedic in scope, with more than 800 poems, 100 photographs, a historical chronology, index of first lines, and bibliography. The Complete Poems will be the definitive English language collection of Akhmatova for many years to come.

History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)

Anatoly Fomenko

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Pants on fire? 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.

Editorial Review:

Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.

Poems of Akhmatova: Izbrannye Stikhi

Anna Akhmatova

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The perfect introductory volume......... 5 out of 5 stars.
27 of 27 people found this review helpful.

This is the volume that introduced me to the works of Anna Akhmatova. After having read this in one evening, I could not sleep - I was so moved by her poetry. The translation must have captured her heart and soul because it certainly captured mine - it inspired me to get up in the middle of the night and draw pictures to go with what I had read. I understood at once the love the Russian people have for her. Since then, I have gobbled up everything translated into English that I can find, but I still think this little volume is the best of all and return to it again and again. Enjoy......

Editorial Review:

Witness to the international and domestic chaos of the first half of the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova (1888-1966) chronicled Russia's troubled times in poems of sharp beauty and intensity. Her genius is now universally acknowledged, and recent biographies attest to a remarkable resurgence of interest in her poetry in this country. Here is the essence of Akhmatova - a landmark selection and translation, including excerpts from "Poem with a Hero."

The Three Sisters

Anton Chekhov

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Masterful 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I recently went to a reading of this play by a theatre group here in Philadelphia that I really enjoy. Although I could write a very positive review of their reading, I'll try and focus on the writing itself. This play presents a masterful peek into societal life for three sisters living in a relatively small Russian city of 100,000 people. The theme of living in your memories or living in your hopes is a major theme that is magnificently played out across the play's long four acts. Each of the main characters has a catch phrase or speech that they deliver a variant of in each act, the first time full of hope and happiness and with each passing act with more and more despair and hopelessness. The three sister's arcs into unhappiness and depression weave together to create a very cohesive whole. I thought the contrast between the three sisters and their one brother played perfectly into the development of the sisters' characters. In fact, the contrast between the male characters and the female characters was very interesting all around. The transformation of Natasha's character was also an interesting shift. I found the character of Solyony to be one of the only male characters that compared to the three sisters, but I can't put my finger on why. Watching the town fall apart through the lives of the sisters made for a great play. If you can stand some slow plot development and lengthy dialog (ie, it is a Russian story), you should really check this play out!

Editorial Review:

In this, his third adaptation of a Chekhov play, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Mamet offers a contemporary, highly accessible version of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Working from a literal translation by Vlada Chernomordik, Mamet has rediscovered the characteristically modern chords in this powerful play and breathes new life into a timeless classic. This is Chekhov rendered in direct, colloquial language marked by Mamet’s finely tuned ear for dialogue.

A Life in Letters (Penguin Classics)

Anton Chekhov

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A real charmeur! 5 out of 5 stars.
23 of 24 people found this review helpful.

Janet Malcolm's "Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey" (2001) - a brilliant little book undeservedly maligned by some reviewers - sent me straight back to the book store for a biography of Anton Chekhov. I can report from this trip that the largest bookstore in South East Asia does not carry one single biography of Chekhov!

Instead, I found "Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters" (2004). And I did not regret it one bit. The book is the fullest collection of Chekhov's letters in English translation to date and contains 370 selected letters reproduced in full. It comes with a chronology of Chekhov's life, a very readable, splendid short introduction, suggestions for further reading, a helpful list of correspondents and four very useful maps. An index at the end of the volume assists in, among other things, finding references to stories and plays in Chekhov's letters.

According to the editors, this book is also the first uncensored edition of Chekhov's correspondence in any language. Chekhov, a physician by training, called the facts of life by their name and took life's mishaps with a sense of humor. Later editors, more prudish and therefore considerably more boring, simply cut out what they called "rude language." Only after Glasnost, in the 1990s, the official portrait of Chekhov as a "decorous and refined gentleman with a stick, who never permitted himself to use racy language and who was rather pious and sickly, with little interest in women" (xv) was beginning to be revised.

The editors point out that Chekhov "may have hidden himself in his literary works, leaving it up to his readers to puzzle out his point of view, and he may have had an aversion to talking about himself in public, but in his letters he could be surprisingly outspoken at times," (xxxv) and so it happens that his correspondence reads almost like the autobiography he always declined to write.

Chekhov's letters illustrate why he is perhaps Russia's best-loved writer: "The qualities which first endeared him to Russian readers back in the 1880s are the same ones which explain his appeal today. He wrote no vast novels in which he attempted to solve the problems of existence [that would be Dostoevsky] or fathom the forces of world history [Tolstoy in "War and Peace"]. He had no particular axe to grind about how people should live their lives, but, like the good doctor that he was, he had a superb ability to diagnose what it was that prevented people from finding happiness and fulfillment and a unique talent for pinpointing it in a clear-sighted way that was a the same time immensely gentle and compassionate. He also had an infectious sense of humour and an unerring sense of life's ironies, which prevented his writing from ever becoming too portentous or sentimental." (xxxvii)

The photo used for the cover shows a pensive Chekhov with a slightly mischievous smile playing around the corner of his mouth. Almost as if just then one of his famous quips had crossed his mind: "Medicine is my lawful wedded wife, and literature is my mistress. When I've had enough of the one, I can go and spend the night with the other."

Editorial Review:

From his teenage years in provincial Russia to his premature death in 1904, Anton Chekhov wrote thousands of letters to a wide range of correspondents. This fascinating new selection tells Chekhov’s story as a man and a writer through affectionate bulletins to his family, insightful discussions of literature with publishers and theater directors, and tender love letters to his actress wife. Vividly evoking landscapes, people, and his daily life, the letters offer revealing glimpses into Chekhov’s preoccupations—the onset of tuberculosis, his dual careers as doctor and writer, and his ambivalence about his growing reputation as Russia’s foremost playwright and author. This volume takes us inside the mind of one of the world’s greatest writers, and the character that emerges from these pages is resilient, generous, charming, and life enhancing.

The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (New York Review Books Classics)

Osip Mandelstam

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

His poems living still 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 22 people found this review helpful.

MANDELSTAM

We do not know the way to the darkness of the word
or the excellent silence
concealed inside our poems
we only know the drumbeat of our own pain
and the flickering madness of a land's best lights lost

All we are and can be
is a poem
that will never come home again.

Stalin's death is Russia's life
The man Mandelstam murdered
His poems living still.

Editorial Review:

Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, the author of some of the most haunting and memorable poems of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, a touchstone for later masters such as Paul Celan and Robert Lowell, Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Mandelstam's last poems, written in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the Gulag, are an extraordinary testament to the endurance of art in the presence of terror.

This book represents a collaboration between the scholar Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, one of contemporary America's finest poets and translators. It also includes Mandelstam's "Conversation on Dante," an uncategorizable work of genius containing the poet's deepest reflections on the nature of the poetic process.

Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology

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Editorial Review:

Prominent Moscow poet Evgeny Bunimovich selected representative work from forty-four living Russian poets born after 1945 to be translated and published in this bilingual edition. The collection ranges from the mordant post-Soviet irony of Igor Irteniev to the fresh voices of poets like Marianna Geide and Anna Russ—young women just beginning to make themselves heard. The book includes the work of Booker Prize winner Sergey Gandlevsky and several winners of the Andrey Bely Prize and Brodsky Fellowships. Most of these poems, and many of the poets, have previously been unpublished in the West.

Contemporary Russian Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology

Gerald S. Smith

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The work of twenty-three poets, living in Russia and abroad and writing during the period since 1975, is highlighted in this dual-language anthology. The book features an extraordinary cohort of talented poets born in Russia between 1935 and 1940, including Bella Akhmadulina, Dmitrii Bobyshev, Joseph Brodsky, Oleg Chukhontsev, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Aleksandr Kushner, Lev Loseff, Yunna Morits, Dmitrii Prigov, and Evgenii Rein. Older poets represented are Boris Chichibabin, Vladimir Kornilov, Bulat Okudzhava, German Plisetsky, and Boris Slutsky; a younger group includes Aleksandr Eremenko, Bakhyt Kenzheev, Yurii Kublanovsky, Aleksei Parshchikov, Olga Sedakova, Elena Shvarts, Aleksei Tsvetkov, and Ivan Zhdanov. Although the selections reveal great stylistic and thematic variety, they are linked by a common concern with the moral and ethical problems that have always engaged Russian poets but that are particularly acute in Russia's latest time of change. The texts, in Russian and in English linear translation, are arranged on facing pages. Notes, biographical sketches, a detailed bibliography, and an informative introduction make this anthology an indispensable resource for teachers, students, and readers of modern Russian literature.

Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An Excellent Translation 5 out of 5 stars.
26 of 26 people found this review helpful.

After finding this book, I found it difficult to put down. Translating Russian poetry is a challenge indeed, and most translators will make mention of that, but Arndt does not. I have read the original Russian of most of these works, as well as several attempts (all unsuccessful) to translate Pushkin, and this is the first time that any person has been able to successfully render its depth and character in English. If you like good poetry, but can't read Russian, then this is the book you will want, and treasure for years to come.

Fantastic translation 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

I've bought this book as a gift to my English-speaking friend and was very impressed with the translation. It is so close to the Russian original. I also like that the books includes fairly tales - excellent reading for kids.

Pushkin Rocks! 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I am a huge fan of Pushkin, and this is the best book of his poems! I got this for my birthday, and I read it all night it was so good! I love his poems, and some are even funny.