Product Description: Marina Tsvetaeva's verse drama Phaedra, completed in 1927, is the most extraordinary of all literary treatments of the Phaedra legend. Angela Livingstone has translated this little-known great work for the first time into English...read more

Product Description: Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was one of the four great Russian poets of the 20th century, along with Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak. Her richly diverse essays provide incomparable insights into poetry, the poetic process, and what it means to be a poet...read more

Moscow in the 1930s is the consummate symbol of the Soviet paradise, a fairy-tale capital where, in Stalin’s words, “life has become better, life has become merrier”. In Happy Moscow Platonov exposes the gulf between this premature triumphal­ism and the harsh reality of low living standards and even lower expectations. For in Stalin’s ideal city there is no longer a place for those who do not fit the bright, shining image of the new men and women of the future. The heroine, Moscow Chestnova, is an Everywoman, both virgin and whore, who flits from man to man, fascinated by the brave new world supposedly taking shape around her. In a variety of styles ranging from the grotesque to the sentimental to the absurd, Platonov lays bare the ways in which language itself has been debased, even borrowing slogans from Stalin’s own speeches for comic effect.

Product Description: Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process, and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether, are presented here in his own words (in translation) and are discussed in the extensive commentaries and introduction...read more

Product Description: The Ratcatcher, Marina Tsvetaeva's masterpiece, is a satirical version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend in the form of a complex narrative poem that bears all the marks of Tsvetaeva's poetic style. Written in 1926, it was not available in Russia until 1965, and has hitherto been virtually unknown in English...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Aiming to be accessible to students at all levels, this series attempts to provide a companion to key works of world literature. This volume examines the political impact and narrative patterning in "Doctor Zhivago" and discusses the marked originality of the book's style.

Product Description: Born in 1861 in Russia, Lou Andreas-Salome is best known for the famous company she kept. But as this book reveals, her relationships with Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud were complex and she had profound influences on each of them. This biography brings us up close to her writing as well as to her life and meeting with Tolstoy, Wagner and other remarkable men...read more

Product Description: Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) belongs to the outstandingly gifted group of poets (including Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova) who were writing in Russia just before and after the Revolution in 1917. Many would say that he is the greatest among these...read more