Adele Marie Barker

A timely study of the “new Russia” at the end of the twentieth century.

Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev

Consuming Russia

Susan Hardy Aiken

Maya Koreneva

Ekaterina Stetsenko

Written over the course of the last four years, a lot of (ex)es obviously had to be added to this comparative study of contemporary Soviet and American women writers. In each of the volume's major sections two stories, one by a contemporary (then)Soviet woman and one by a contemporary American woman, become the focus of two interpretive essays, one by an American, one by an (ex)Soviet scholar. These dialogues are juxtaposed, in turn, with another set of encounters--those of the American and Soviet coauthors. Each section concludes with brief segments of transcribed discussions. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Dialogues

Bruce Grant

An account of the day-to-day scramble to make ends meet after the end of the Soviet Union, letters recording ordinary Russians' reactions to the Revolution as events unfolded in 1917, and excerpts from a sixteenth-century manual instructing elite Muscovites on proper household management--The Russia Readerbrings these and many other selections together in this introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the world's largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today. Conveying the texture of everyday life alongside experiences of epic historical events, the reader is filled with the voices of men and women, rulers and revolutionaries, peasants, soldiers, literary figures, émigrés, journalists, and scholars. Most of the selections are by Russians; thirty are translated into English for the first time. The collection is illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons; fifteen images appear in colour. The volume's editors introduce each of the thematic sections and all of the written selections.The Russia Readerincorporates song lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, and Akhmatova. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public. From a tenth-century emissary describing his encounters in Kyivan Rus', to a scientist recalling her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist depicting the decadence of the "New Russians" in the 2000s,The Russia Readeris an extraordinary introduction to a vast and varied land.

History, Culture, Politics

The Russia Reader

Jehanne M. Gheith

A History of Women's Writing in Russia offers a comprehensive account of the lives and works of Russia's women writers. Based on original and archival research, this volume forces a re-examination of many of the traditionally held assumptions about Russian literature and women's role in the tradition. In setting about the process of reintegrating women writers into the history of Russian literature, contributors have addressed the often surprising contexts within which women's writing has been produced. Chapters reveal a flourishing literary tradition where none was thought to exist. They redraw the map defining Russia's literary periods, they look at how Russia's women writers articulated their own experience, and they reassess their relationship to the dominant male tradition. The volume is supported by extensive reference features including a bibliography and guide to writers and their works.

Adele Marie Barker

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