Men Without Women PDF Download

Author: Eliot Borenstein
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822325925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
An analysis of the construction of masculinity in early Soviet culture that finds in the novels of Babel and others an utopian society composed exclusively of men.

Author: Andrey Platonov
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681377691
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
Chevengur is a revolutionary novel about revolutionary ardor and despair. Zakhar Pavlovich comes from a world of traditional crafts to work as a train mechanic, motivated by his belief in the transformative power of industry. His adopted son, Sasha Dvanov, embraces revolution, which will transform everything: the words we speak and the lives we live, souls and bodies, the soil underfoot and the sun overhead. Seeking communism, Dvanov joins up with Stepan Kopionkin, a warrior for the cause whose steed is the fearsome cart horse Strength of the Proletariat. Together they cross the steppe, encountering counterrevolutionaries, desperados, and visionaries of all kinds. At last they reach the isolated town of Chevengur. There communism is believed to have been achieved because everything that is not communism has been eliminated. And yet even in Chevengur the revolution recedes from sight. Comic, ironic, grotesque, disturbingly poetic in its use of language, and profoundly sorrowful, Chevengur—here published in a new English translation based on the most authoritative Russian text—is the most ambitious of the extraordinary novels that the great Andrey Platonov wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, when Soviet Russia was moving from revolutionary euphoria to state terror.

Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168829X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov. The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.

Author: Andrey Platonov
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448104599
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
"Reading Platonov, one gets a sense of the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language and with each...utterance, that absurdity deepens" - Joseph Brodsky People are on the move in all ten stories in this collection, coming home as in "The Return", leaving home as in "Rubbish Wind", travelling far away from their country as in "The Locks of Epiphan", trying to improve their lives and those of others, running away, searching, fleeing. Their journeys are accompanied by two motives which characterize the writing of Andrey Platonov: optimism and faith in the goodness of humanity, and abject despair at the cruelty, randomness, and apparent senselessness of our existence. The protagonists are torn between these poles and sometimes a synthesis shines through the mists of the apparent naivety of faith and the blackness of despair: the hope against hope that a better life is still possible. Though Russian readers and critics have come to look on Platonov as among their greatest prose writers of this century, he has yet to enjoy a parallel international reputation - mainly because much of his best writing was suppressed for more than 60 years. Combining a realism inspired by his work as an engineer with poetic vision and the deceptively simple language of folk tales, Platonov sets his stories alight by using language in a way that renders it unfamiliar, makes the ordinary seem unusual and the extraordinary logical. This translation is the first to present the full range of Platonov's gift as a short story writer to an English-language readership, showing why it is that Joseph Brodsky regarded Platonov as the equal of Joyce, Kafka and Proust. "...strange, almost abrupt, a hallucinatory, nightmarish parable of hysterical laughter and terrifying silences" - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times - in reference to The Foundation Pit

Author: Jonathan FLATLEY
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674036964
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss.

Author: Michael Bell
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 1568984839
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
In a new double issue, 32BNY traces the modern urban trajectories of Russia and China, mapping their connections, divergences, and potential futures. From the legacy of Russia in the 1920s, to the volatile architectural energy of China today, 32 revisits what had once seemed irrefutable binaries: communism and capitalism, east and west, history and progress. Issue 5/6 includes: Irene Cheng on the New Silk Road Bart Goldhoorn on Capitalist Realism Rob Gregory on Catherine Cooke and the state of Moscow's modern architecture Leo Ou-fan Lee on Shanghai circa 1930 Peter Lynch on El Lissitsky Thomas de Monchaux on Melnikov's House Shrinking Cities on Ivanovo Slavoj Zizek on Lenin and freedom today Projects by Office dA (with text by Rodolphe El Khoury) Steven Holl Architects Zhang Lei Bernard Tschumi Architects Ai Weiwei (with text by Toshiko Mori) Photographs by Sze Tsung Leong Armin Linke Joe Wolek Plus FOA's Alejandro Zaera-Polo interviewed by Guy Zucker

Author: Andrei Platonov
Publisher: ISCI
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.

Author: Neil Cornwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134260776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1020

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Book Description
First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.

Author: Mary A. Nicholas
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 0838757391
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The cost of constructing Envy: Iurii Olesha and the Soviet production novel -- How she worked on Hydrocentral: Marietta Shaginian and the changing Soviet author -- Building "Novye Vaiuki": Ilf and Petrov map the production novel -- (Re)constructing the production novel: Boris Pilniak, Mahogany, and The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea -- Finding space in Time, forward! Kataev and writers at work -- Deconstructing Soviet work: Andrei Platonov and the end of the production novel.

Author: Andrey Platonov
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590172544
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
A New York Review Books Original The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov’s vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called “alternative realism.” Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka. This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are “The Return,” about an officer’s difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of “three great works of Russian literature of the millennium”; “The River Potudan,” a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech. This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov’s short fiction.