Author: Varlan Shalamov Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141961953 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 488
Book Description
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.
Author: Varlam Shalamov Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0718196465 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 12
Book Description
Narrated in the first person, this short story is one episode in the life of a Russian labour-camp inmate. Written by Varlam Shalamov after his own experiences at a gulag, it describes the apathy of prisoners as they steadily approach death, the assuredness of betrayal and duplicity, and the constant craving for material satisfaction to lessen the empty, scorched feeling inside. When an old acquaintance lays out an escape plan, that satisfaction is offered in the form of condensed milk: a sweet, delicious extravagance - a small element of joy in the midst of impending death.
Author: A S J Wells Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd ISBN: 1836286767 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
The lives of seemingly ordinary people intertwine in GRAPHITE, a modern contemporary saga, when a man saves the life of a toddler. Whilst waiting for the bus, Maurice meets and chats with Arnold, a bin man. He decides to walk home and ends up saving toddler, Charlie, from being hit by a car. He is accused of attempted kidnap and is sent to prison. Terry, his lawyer, looks for the driver, but his investigation gets complicated, involving the Met police and an International Crime Organisation led by Masood. Sean, a priest, is forced on sabbatical for his outcry during Maurice’s arrest. He travels to Malaga and befriends Miguel, a gay man. In hospital he falls in love with Maria, a nurse. Will love or the church decide his future? Birdie, a Met Sergeant, known as the Ice Maiden, and Ivor, a Met detective and flirt, help Terry seek the car driver and a mole in their office. She visits her brother, Terry’s assistant, and is attacked by local thug. GRAPHITE is a gripping crime and psychological duology with humour that will keep readers hooked until the very end.
Author: Jacek Hugo-Bader Publisher: Portobello Books ISBN: 1846275032 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world's last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his 'fellow travellers', the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia
Author: Лидия Корнеевна Чуковская Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 9780810111509 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 132
Book Description
Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves. Sofia Petrovna offers a rare and vital record of Stalin's Great Purges.
Author: Varlam Shalamov Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0718196457 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 19
Book Description
Merzlakov, once a robust stable-hand, now fights hunger, pain and exhaustion after a year and a half at a labour camp. An enormous man given little food, he sees the larger men dying first, their bodies conquered by starvation. In his desperation for survival, he begins a yearlong struggle of pain and injury. It ends with the inscrutable and punctilious Dr Peter Ivanovich. In a curious mix of empathy and haunting objectivity, this short story describes a snapshot of life in a Russian labour-camp. Written after Varlam Shalamov's own experiences at a gulag, it is one episode in the many that make up Kolyma Tales.
Author: Alexander N. Yakovlev Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300103229 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
He unhesitatingly names those individuals who bear responsibility for these catastrophic deaths, bringing into sharper focus than ever before the facts, the perpetrators, and the events of the Soviet Union's years of terror."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Sophy Roberts Publisher: Grove Press ISBN: 0802149308 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 443
Book Description
This “melodious” mix of music, history, and travelogue “reveals a story inextricably linked to the drama of Russia itself . . . These pages sing like a symphony.” —The Wall Street Journal Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies, and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos—grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos traveled into this snowbound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers, and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle. The Lost Pianos of Siberia follows Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful—and peppered with pianos. “An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book.” —Paul Theroux
Author: Martin J. Bollinger Publisher: US Naval Institute Press ISBN: 9781591140467 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"This book documents the often horrific stories of the Gulag fleet and its passengers and reveals the unwitting role of the U. S. government in the operation. U.S. shipyards built most of the Gulag fleet and later overhauled many ships free of charge. Bollinger details this tragic saga of forced relocation using firsthand testimony from those involved in the operation and materials from both American and Russian archives. His examination of how much Washington knew about the use of American ships to transport slave laborers adds valuable information to the record of the Soviet Union under Stalin."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Vasiliĭ Semenovich Grossman Publisher: NYRB Classics ISBN: 1590173619 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
The writer whom Vasily Grossman loved most of all was Anton Chekhov. Grossman’s own short stories are no less accomplished than his novels, and they are remarkably varied. “The Dog” is about the first living creature to be sent into space and then returned to Earth. “The Road,” an account of the war from a mule in an Italian artillery regiment, can be read as a 4,000-word distillation of Life and Fate. “Mother” is based on a true story about an orphaned girl who was adopted by Nikolay Yezhov (head of the NKVD at the height of the Great Terror) and his wife; it includes brief portraits of Stalin and several important Soviet writers and politicians—all of them as seen through the eyes of the little girl or of her honest but uncomprehending peasant nanny. As well as a dozen stories—from “In the Town of Berdichev” (Grossman’s first published success) to “In Kislovodsk” (the last story he wrote)—this volume includes an unusual article about the life of a Moscow cemetery. It also contains two letters Grossman wrote to his mother, after her death at the hands of the Nazis, and the complete text of “The Hell of Treblinka,” one of the very first, and still among the most powerful, accounts of a Nazi death camp.
Author: Varlan Shalamov
Author: Varlam Shalamov
Author: A S J Wells
Author: Jacek Hugo-Bader
Author: Лидия Корнеевна Чуковская
Author: Varlam Shalamov
Author: Alexander N. Yakovlev
Author: Sophy Roberts
Author: Martin J. Bollinger
Author: Vasiliĭ Semenovich Grossman