One of the most renowned Soviet writers of the twentieth century, Maxim Gorky was an early supporter of the Bolsheviks who became disillusioned with the turn of events after the 1917 revolution. This brilliant and controversial book is a collection of the critical articles Gorky wrote that describe the Russian national character, condemn the Bolshevik methods of government, and provide a vision of the future.

"An important book of as much interest now as at the time it was written."--Walter Laqueur

"Untimely Thoughts is now timely. Gorky's journalistic pieces are...

Believing that human actions could be controlled by a totalitarian government, Stalin and his followers subjected millions of Soviet citizens to acts of state terrorism and imprisonment in labor camps. But this was not enough. Seeking to control human thought as well, Soviet authorities provided official words and images to legitimize the gulag, distort its moral nature, and even glorify its "necessary" violence. This fascinating book is the first in English to examine official Soviet concentration camp literature from the early 1920s through the mid-1960s. Dariusz Tolczyk probes the...

A prominent scholar here writes about two kinds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian intellectuals: those with a passion for ideology (often the most extreme form); and those who, inspired by libertarian humanism, developed sophisticated critiques of ideology.

This volume brings the remarkable writings of Russian liberal thinker Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828-1904) to English-language readers for the first time. The collection includes key essays in which Chicherin addresses the central political and social problems that confronted Russia from 1855 to the opening years of the twentieth century. Chicherin's ideological alternatives to the Bolshevik plan for revolutionary transformation of Russia not only provide valuable historical insights, but also are highly relevant to current political discussion of liberalism in Russia and in the West....

In a major burst of creativity, Russian poet Alexander Pushkin during just three months in 1830 completed Eugene Onegin, composed more than thirty lyric poems, wrote several short stories and folk tales, and penned the four short dramas in verse that comprise the "little tragedies." The "little tragedies" stand among the great masterpieces of Russian literature, yet they were last translated into English a quarter-century ago and have in recent years been out of print entirely. In this outstanding new translation, Nancy K. Anderson preserves the cadence and intensity of Pushkin's work while...

In this eagerly anticipated book, Boris Gasparov gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. He discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin...

This book explores the historical insights of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia's most celebrated poet and arguably its greatest thinker. Svetlana Evdokimova examines for the first time the full range of Pushkin's fictional and nonfictional writings on the subject of history--writings that have strongly influenced Russians' views of themselves and their past. Through new readings of his drama, Boris Godunov; such narrative poems as Poltava, The Bronze Horseman, and Count Nulin; prose fiction, including The Captain's Daughter and Blackamoor of Peter...