November 01, 2011 End of the USSR A ground-eye view of the end of the USSR, which took place 20 years ago this month.
March 14, 2021 A Memory Battle for Lubyanka Square The hoopla surrounding a new monument at a controversial location in central Moscow highlights the importance of history for Russia – and ourselves.
May 09, 2021 The Past in the Past: Reading a Book about Soviet Archaeology A sixty-year-old Christmas present reveals how Soviet archaeologists perceived their craft.
July 04, 2021 Eisenstein's Mythic Masterpiece: Alexander Nevsky The legend of Russia's heroic defender passed into Stalinist myth with some help from one of the 20th century's most famous filmmakers.
August 05, 2020 The West's Holodomor Unmasker A street in Kyiv is being renamed in honor of a journalist who helped expose Soviet Ukraine’s deathly famine.
Resilience ~ The Russian Version (Переживем) Call it resilience, grit, or just perseverance – it takes a special sort of person to have survived the last 100 years of Russian and Soviet history.
The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas This exciting new trilogy by a Russian author – who has been compared to Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco – vividly recreates a lost world, yet its passions and characters are entirely relevant to the present day. Full of mystery, memorable characters, and non-stop adventure, The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas is a must read for lovers of historical fiction and international thrillers.
Far & Away ~ Tales from Rural Russia 33 original stories about modern (and not so modern) life in rural Russia.
Driving Down Russia's Spine The story of the epic Spine of Russia trip, intertwining fascinating subject profiles with digressions into historical and cultural themes relevant to understanding modern Russia.
How Russia Got That Way A fast-paced crash course in Russian history, from Norsemen to Navalny, that explores the ways the Kremlin uses history to achieve its ends.
Survival Russian Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.
Woe From Wit (bilingual) One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
White Magic The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
Dostoyevsky Bilingual Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided.
A Taste of Chekhov This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
Steppe / Степь (bilingual) This is the work that made Chekhov, launching his career as a writer and playwright of national and international renown. Retranslated and updated, this new bilingual edition is a super way to improve your Russian.
The Little Golden Calf Our edition of The Little Golden Calf, one of the greatest Russian satires ever, is the first new translation of this classic novel in nearly fifty years. It is also the first unabridged, uncensored English translation ever, and is 100% true to the original 1931 serial publication in the Russian journal 30 Dnei. Anne O. Fisher’s translation is copiously annotated, and includes an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, the daughter of one of the book’s two co-authors.
